Star Wars Beginnings and Endings: Beginnings
by alanish2
Summary: The Galaxy is on a knife edge. A mysterious weapon has been made whole again. The Jedi have been driven insane by the lust for its power. A civil war is still raging. And right in the middle of this threat lie a group of people who are in way over their heads. But there is more to them than even they know. And, deep in space, an ancient enemy lies waiting for its moment...
1. Prologue

**Prologue**

* * *

_One hundred and fifty thousand years ago…_

A long dead race, who would later become known as _Celestials, _tore a hole through reality. They were looking for nothing but a power source, but what they found was something much more…

* * *

_Thirty thousand years ago…_

The Celestials were all but gone. Their fall, unknown to the species' that would rise after, was of their own making. From their ashes, the _Rakata _rose to become the dominant force in the Galaxy. Using salvaged _Celestial _technology which they could barely comprehend they tore holes through Hyperspace, allowing them to move across the vast emptiness of space in an instant. Their advanced technology allowed them to dominate other species, who they either slaughtered or forced into slavery. Their Empire grew quickly, and became one of the largest – and most feared – in recorded history.

But the harsh reality was that they were nothing but slaves themselves. All of their advanced technology, and they failed to sense the Darkness which had taken control of them. This was the legacy that the _Celestials _had left behind… the Force. By the time the _Rakatans_ realised that their minds were not their own, they were too far gone. The power that they held was their only reason for being now, and they were desperate to maintain their iron grip on the Galaxy. To this end, they built a vast manufacturing plant in space, designed to quickly build fleets of powerful warships. Its size was so great that it needed nothing less than an entire star as its power source. It was christened the _Star Forge._

But, despite their power, the darkness in which the _Rakatans_ shrouded themselves proved their undoing.

* * *

_Twenty five thousand years ago…_

Five thousand years after the _Rakatan_ empire first rose, treachery and mistrust caused it to implode. Many factions had formed, each striving to gain more and more power over the others. The _Rakatans _destroyed themselves.

In its wake, the Galactic Republic emerged. Their philosophers had spent many years studying the mysterious Force, though they did not know of its origins. They knew its power, but believed it had a benevolent side as well as the Darkness. A group of Force users emerged, calling themselves 'Jedi', and they worked alongside the politicians and military to try to ensure that this young Republic would stand the test of time. But there were many threats to its stability…

* * *

_Five thousand years ago…_

One of the greatest threats to the Republic came twenty-thousand years into its life. Ravaged by a war with the aggressive _Mandalorians, _the Republic came under attack from an old enemy… the _Sith_. The Sith were dark mirrors to the Jedi, diving head first into the darkest corners of the Force, and drowning themselves in it. They attacked with a military might which seemed impossible… a fleet of thousands of ships. They overwhelmed the Republic forces, and took the Jedi to the brink of extinction.

However, a small group of misfits emerged to fight this threat. They discovered the source of the Sith's military strength. They were using the Star Forge, built long ago by the _Rakatans_, to create their ships. Once this fact was revealed, it was quickly attacked and destroyed. The Galaxy, it seemed, was safe again.

More threats came and went, but none brought the Republic to the brink of destruction as the Star Forge had.

* * *

_One thousand two hundred years ago…_

The revolutionary Sith Lord Darth Bane travelled to the Lehon system, once home to the Star Forge, in his search to find more about the history of his people. He discovered the wreckage of the space station, still preserved from battles four thousand years before.

Darth Bane recognised the power that the Star Forge held, and secretly hatched a plan to reclaim it for his new Sith.

* * *

_Two hundred and twenty years ago…_

The Republic fell, and it was down to one man. Darth Sidious. Born a human on the Outer Rim planet of Naboo, Darth Sidious, then known as Palpatine, was discovered and corrupted by the Sith Lord Darth Plagueis. Over the course of many years, Darth Pagueis worked to manipulate Palpatine into following the malevolent Dark Side of the Force, exploiting his resentment for his father, a wealthy aristocrat. The culmination of this manipulation came when Palpatine's anger grew so great that he slaughtered his entire family, including his own wife. It was at that point that he was christened Darth Sidious, the newest Lord of the Sith.

Like his master, Darth Sidious kept his former identity and continued his political ambitions, becoming a well-known ambassador for Naboo. His role eventually led to an association with the Council of the Republic, putting him in direct contact with the Jedi. His power was great, and he was able to conceal the darkness inside him from even the most powerful of the Jedi while he waited for the opportunity to put his plans into action.

This opportunity came in the wake of a Galactic crisis, secretly exacerbated by Sidious himself. The Trade Federation conducted an illegal blockade of the planet Naboo, causing major political outrage in many corners of the Council. In the wake of this crisis, the Republic chose to vote Palpatine into the role of Supreme Chancellor of the Republic, a long dormant title which allowed its wearer almost complete control of the Council. At this point, Sidious was the most powerful politician in the Galaxy, as well as the secret Lord of the Sith, working to destroy the Republic from within.

Ten years after ascending to power, Darth Sidious orchestrated the Clone Wars, a devastating conflict which ravaged the Galaxy. As Chancellor Palpatine, he controlled the Galactic Republic, and as Darth Sidious he also controlled their enemy, the Confederacy of Independent Systems, playing both sides against each other to further his own plans.

In the wake of the billions of deaths caused by this conflict, public support for Chancellor Palpatine grew to unprecedented levels. Palpatine used this to his advantage, working to abolish sections of the Galactic Constitution, which had been formed almost twenty five thousand years previously, transferring much of the power of the senate to himself.

It was around this time that Palpatine revealed his identity as Dark Lord of the Sith to a young Jedi named Anakin Skywalker. The young Jedi had always been conflicted, but was a passionate supporter of both democracy and the legal system. He immediately informed Jedi Master Mace Windu of Palpatine's betrayal. Windu confronted the Dark Lord, attempting to destroy him rather than arrest him. This went against Anakin Skywalker's beliefs and, in a moment of blind panic, Skywalker murdered Mace Windu, sealing his conversion to the Dark Side. Sidious took Skywalker as his newest apprentice, christening him Darth Vader, and ordered him to lead a slaughter of all Jedi in the Galaxy.

With Darth Sidious now in control of the entire Galaxy, and with the Jedi almost wiped out, the Old Republic, which had stood for 25,000 years, was disbanded and the new Galactic Empire was formed.

Almost as soon as the Empire was formed, another group formed to oppose it. They called themselves the Alliance to Restore the Republic, but later became known simply as the Rebel Alliance.

* * *

_Two hundred years ago…_

Public support for the Empire was initially high, but years of tyrannical rule and needless slaughter changed that. The Empire ruled absolutely for 23 years, opposed but rarely threatened. That all changed at the Battle of Endor, when a young Luke Skywalker broke through Sidious's manipulations of his father, Darth Vader, and reminded him of the goodness in his heart. Vader turned on his master, killing him. The death of the Emperor marked the beginning of the fall of the Empire.

In the wake of the Battle of Endor, the people of the Galaxy looked to the Rebel Alliance for guidance and rule. The New Republic was founded, dedicated to bringing democracy back to the Galaxy.

The Empire was not completely destroyed, however, and war continued on and off for decades, swinging back and forth in favour of the Alliance or the Empire.

* * *

_One hundred and seventy years ago…_

Twenty five years after the death of Darth Sidious, the Galaxy faced a new threat the likes of which it had never seen. A race of violent religious zealots, known as the Yuuzhan Vong, invaded the Galaxy. Their four year campaign to wipe out all mechanical technology ravaged the Galaxy, resulting in the deaths of trillions of life forms. Unlike the Sith, who sought power over the Galaxy, the Yuuzhan Vong seemed to only crave destruction. It took the combined efforts of every military force in the Galaxy, but the Yuuzhan Vong were eventually defeated. However, the Galaxy was left in ruins.

It was during this war that the New Republic was devastated. In its wake, the Galactic Alliance was formed, focusing more on a military front to repel the invading Yuuzhan Vong. This new Alliance was not only formed from former members of the Republic, but also members of the Empire and other major Galactic Organisations as well, making it the first truly unified government in the history of the Galaxy.

Peace did not last. Partly due to manipulations from the resurgent Sith, the Galactic Alliance became much more domineering, to the point that many planets came to view it as a new Galactic Empire. This was worsened when the sections of the Council which favoured the old Empire once again seized power. However, unlike before, the Empire was viewed as the more benevolent faction, and gained public support. On the surface, this new Empire worked to help planets, and acted in a manner closer to the Old Republic than the Old Galactic Alliance. However, behind the scenes the Sith once again worked to corrupt this new government.

* * *

_Sixty years ago…_

Civil war once again broke out. However, this time the Empire was divided. Some were tired of the constant war and bloodshed, and only wished for a fair and efficient government. They joined forces with the remaining remnants of the Alliance and waged war against the Empire, which had by that point fallen under Sith rule. The war was long and bloody, but this Alliance eventually won out and the Empire fell, seemingly for good.

However, the reinstated Alliance Council were left reeling by what had happened. This wasn't a case of military power ousting them from government, but a genuine political party taking power away from them through public support. This led them to rethink the way they ran elections, tightening their grip on their democracy. Within three decades, elections had become simply side shows, where only government approved candidates could stand for office. Tensions quickly rose between the government and the people it was meant to represent.

* * *

_Twenty years ago…_

Protestors began demonstrating against the government. As they grew in popularity and frequency, the major players joined together and formed a group which they called the New Rebel Alliance. Initially, they were dedicated to peaceful protests, trying to sway public opinion, which was already turning against the Alliance, and force the government to change its policies. For many years this continued, with frustrations building on both sides at the lack of change being made.

It was the Alliance who first took military action, opening fire on a large but peaceful protest on Coruscant. The Rebels, who by then had grown in number such that they almost rivalled the Alliance in numbers and resources, responded by launching structured military attacks on Alliance outposts in the Outer Rim. Full-scale war erupted once again.

The Jedi, who had played a major role one way or the other in every conflict in the previous few centuries, elected to stay out of this war. They reasoned that they had no right to interfere in a political conflict, and, while morally they agreed with the Rebels, they would not assist their military.

* * *

_Five years ago…_

Ten years into the conflict, however, sections of the Jedi Order began to grow unsettled. There had been countless deaths, and still there was no end in sight. Some of the Jedi felt that they should move to end the conflict to stem the loss of life. However, the Jedi Council refused to change its stance.

In response to this, some Jedi began to act against the Council's wishes in secret, aiding the Rebels in many of their military actions. Initially, they worked separately. However, as their numbers grew they saw no choice but to officially establish themselves as a separatist group. Calling themselves the Grey Order, they officially joined the conflict on the side of the Rebels, helping to sway the war in their favour.

* * *

_Three weeks ago…_

One of these missions involved attacking the Alliance's flagship, the _Endor_. Two Grey Jedi, Jani and Gabe, went along for this mission, assisting the team of Rebel ships which were sent in. The plan was to capture the _Endor_, liberating it for the Rebels to turn against the Alliance. This plan did not work.

A small team comprising the two Jedi and two dozen Rebel soldiers boarded the _Endor_. While the soldiers engaged the Alliance forces, the two Jedi snuck into the bowels of the ship and made their way to the bridge, planning to assassinate the Alliance commanders. When they arrived they dropped into a trap. The Alliance had planned for the Rebels to attack, using the _Endor_ as bait. They had joined forces with the Jedi Order, several of which had lain in wait for Jani and Gabe.

Meanwhile, the two opposing sets of soldiers were battling their way around the ship. As the battle quickly turned in favour of the Alliance, the Rebel Lieutenant in charge of the boarding party, Garin, ordered a full retreat, leading his surviving soldiers to the escape pods. They jettisoned the escape pods, assuming that the remaining Rebel ships would stop to pick them up. However, these ships jumped out of the system, leaving the escape pods to drift in space.

Meanwhile, close by on a backwater planet called Socorro, a young man named Marc hated his life. His father was a drunk, and regularly beat Marc and his mother. His only friend was another boy called Sar, who he often travelled to the nearby mountains with. He would share his dreams with his friend – dreams of leaving Socorro and seeing the Galaxy.

Though Marc's father was strict – or perhaps because of it – Marc was drawn to danger, to doing things which he knew would get him in trouble. One of these stunts landed him in more trouble than he could have expected. Sar's uncle was the owner of a small casino, and they would regularly run a scam in which Sar played cards and his uncle fixed them. Marc took part in this scam once. His parents, who had come into the village to visit the local celebrations – stumbled into the casino. His father confronted him – an action which alerted Marc's fellow card players to their scam. These men were criminals, and would not have thought twice about killing Marc and Sar's uncle. So Marc ran, dragging Sar along with him, with the men in pursuit.

They managed to evade them for several minutes, but eventually they were cornered. Feeling that his death was inevitable, Marc closed his eyes and accepted his fate. But they were rescued at the last second by a group of Rebel soldiers – the survivors of the battle on the Endor who had drifted to Socorro.

Marc was overcome with wonder at the thought of talking with real soldiers. So overcome, in fact, that he had forgotten that his father would still be angry with him. He was beaten – worse than ever before – and, when his father's fists became too sore, he was thrown outside into the deadly sunlight, which would burn his skin and cause severe radiation poisoning.

Though he was severely injured, he managed to make his way to the village, collapsing outside the house of a girl called Elle – a pretty girl who Marc had a secret crush on. She spotted him outside, and, despite the danger, rushed outside and dragged him to safety. They soon fell in love.

Marc remained unconscious for two weeks. When he finally awoke, Elle was taking care of him. Her and Sar convinced Marc to tell the local authorities about his father's abuse. Reluctantly he did so. When he travelled with the sheriff to confront his father, his mother screamed that he was a liar and scratched at his face.

When he returned to his friends he refused to speak of what had happened. Instead, he led them into the mountains. There they were confronted by the men who Marc had cheated at cards two weeks earlier. They were chased through caves, managing to escape when they fell through a hole in the ground. They emerged in a large structure – it looked like a temple, older than anything they had seen before. At the centre there was a pedestal, which held a purple fragment of what appeared to be glass. When Marc approached it it started to glow, and he felt it invade his mind.

When the feeling passed, and they had all come to their senses, they left the cave. They made their way slowly home, exchanging their life stories as they travelled. Before they reached their home they encountered Garin once more – he asked them for help. He needed to get off the planet, but he didn't know where to begin. Marc agreed to show him the way to Hathrass, the largest city in the area.

While Garin set off to find a vehicle to take them there, Marc and Elle walked in the sand dunes surrounding the village. They had a picnic, and talked about what they would do after they had left the village. Their fun was interrupted, however, by two fighter ships suddenly entering the atmosphere high above them. The two ships were involved in a fierce dogfight. One of the ships was catastrophically damaged, and crashed to the ground near to where Marc and Elle were eating. Elle was frightened and wanted to go back to the village, but Marc insisted on investigating. His instincts proved correct; the pilot was still alive. Risking his own life, Marc dived into the flaming wreckage to drag the woman out.

Her wounds were severe – she had burns, a nasty bang on the head and a wound in her stomach. Marc knew that it would take too long to take her to the village doctors, which left only one option; they would have to take her to his parents. His father had been an army medic, and his mother a nurse, during the war.

Though his father was obnoxious – even vicious – when he saw Marc, he agreed to help the woman. Marc felt that he could not stay in the same room as him, so he and Elle left. As they walked outside, they heard loud noises in the distance. The village was under attack.

They sprinted towards the village, but by the time they got there only devastation was left; buildings were lying in smoking ruins, and dead bodies lined the streets. They wandered through the wreckage in a daze – past screaming children who had watched their parents die, past countless dead bodies – and eventually made their way to the remains of Elle's home. There, they collapsed and wept.

A voice broke through their sorrow. It was coming from underneath a pile of wreckage near to them. Marc dug through the wreckage and found Garin, badly injured but still alive. This one small piece of good news was enough to shake Marc out of his sorrow, and he resolved to find Sar.

He headed to his friend's home, expecting it to be ruins like the rest of the village. To his surprise, the house was still standing, untouched. He nervously made his way inside, and found Sar's mother, mutilated on the floor. Someone had tortured her. At first he thought she was dead, but she suddenly started to writhe in pain and gurgle. A woman appeared behind Marc – it was the woman he had pulled from the wreckage and taken to his parent's home. She convinced him that Sar's mother was suffering, and would be better off dead. Marc wrapped his hands around her neck and ended her suffering.

Elle, meanwhile, was on the brink of hysteria. She couldn't understand how Marc could have abandoned her there, alone with Garin. She started to drag Garin away – she knew that the sun would be coming up soon and that it would kill everyone if they didn't get to shelter. Marc appeared, with the mysterious woman.

They learned that the woman's name was Jani, and that she was a Grey Jedi. She explained that she was drifting through space when she suddenly felt a disturbance in the Force, which called her to this planet. Unfortunately, it also called to a Dark Jedi, who attacked her as she entered the atmosphere, leading to her crashing to the ground where Marc found her. It was this Dark Jedi, she claimed, who had destroyed the village.

They were both being drawn to Sar's house, and to the pull of the fragment which Sar had secretly taken from the cavern in the mountains. The Dark Jedi took both the fragment and Sar, and he planned on taking them to a distant planet where he intended to reunited the fragment with its other half. Unfortunately, the only way to unlock the path to the second fragment was to force the first fragment to glow, like it had when Marc approached it. As the Dark Jedi found the fragment with Sar he must have assumed that it was he who made the orb glow.

They managed to drag Garin to shelter, and the next evening they set off to Hathrass to find a way off planet.

Through a series of complicated circumstances, they ended up hitching a ride from a smuggler called Garr, who had recently lost his ship, and then regained it with the help of Jani and Marc. Unfortunately, in the fighting Marc was seriously injured, and had to be taken to the Medical Bay on Garr's ship, unconscious.

They headed to Dantooine, where Garr planned to meet up with his partner. Jani, Marc and Elle intended to acquire a ship of their own and follow the Dark Jedi to the distant planet and rescue Sar, while Garin planned to separate from them on Dantooine and travel to Tatooine to reunite with the Rebels, determined to inform them of the Jedi Order's betrayal and the threat that the fragments represented.

On the journey, however, Jani revealed that she had ulterior motives. She told Elle that if it came to a choice between saving Sar and claiming the fragments for herself, she would choose the fragments and kill anyone in her way. Elle was shocked, and hurried off to tell the others. Jani moved to Marc's unconscious body and revived him. They talked about the nature of the Force, but then Jani seduced Marc and the two had sex.

The news that Jani was not everything she appeared to be concerned Garin. He reconsidered his decision to separate from the others, even though he knew that in a straight fight he would stand no chance against the Jedi.

When they arrived on Dantooine, problems ensued immediately. Garr's partner was making her escape from unknown assailants, who turned out to be people she had stolen something valuable from. Garin left to prepare another ship to take them after Sar and the Dark Jedi, but while he was gone Garr's ship, the Raven, came under attack. Because of this, they were forced to leave the planet, leaving Garin behind on the surface. This meant that not only were Marc and Elle left with Jani, and Garin on the surface of Dantooine, but also that Marc remained in critical condition – which was made worse by the fact that the Raven was chased and badly damaged, and the turbulence this caused worsened Marc's condition.

As the Raven drifted in space, tensions built. Jani blamed Garr and his partner, Batalla, for their situation and the enforced delay in their pursuit of the Dark Jedi. Suddenly, the Endor, the Alliance ship which the Rebels attacked at the beginning, appeared beside them. The Alliance Admiral demanded that Marc be turned over to them.

Garr argued that the only place within reaching distance that has the medical facilities to treat Marc was the Endor, and Jani reluctantly agreed. Elle refused to stay behind on the Raven, and insisted that wherever Marc went she would follow.

Elle, Marc and Jani were incarcerated on board the Endor.

Meanwhile, on a faraway planet, the Dark Jedi had taken Sar to an ancient temple. He demanded that Sar make the fragment glow to lead the way to the second fragment. Though he delayed as long as possible, Sar was forced to admit that he wasn't the one who made it glow in the first place. The Dark Jedi lost control, and caved Sar's skull in with a rock. He set off in search of the right person – Marc.

He reasoned that Jani must have found who they were both looking for, and so he followed his senses to where he knew her to be. He attacked the Endor shortly after, boarding the ship and battling his way to the medical bay where Marc was being kept. He kidnapped Marc and took him back to his ship. Jani used the distraction to escape from her cell using the Force. Elle was being kept in a cell opposite her, but Jani left her behind. Elle realised that Marc was the one thing that she wanted – the one she had always wanted – because he could help her get the fragments.

The Dark Jedi and Marc travelled to the faraway planet with Jani in pursuit. During this journey, Marc awakened from the coma that he had been in. He quickly deduced that the 'Dark Jedi' is in fact Gabe, the Grey Jedi who was with Jani when they attacked the Endor at the very beginning of the story. Marc also knew that Gabe and Jani were lovers, because Jani talked about him before, though she said that he had been killed.

Marc then plunged his mind into the orb, which showed him visions of a strange and faraway place. He was greeted there by a vision of his brother, though Marc sensed immediately that it was not really his brother, who in reality had died many years ago. He saw a large structure, filled with highly advanced equipment and strange creatures – resembling octopi, but the size of buses and with the ability to float in the air as though weightless. Marc's brother called them 'Architects' or 'Celestials', and revealed that they were watching events which had happened 150,000 years ago. They were about to witness the 'birth' of the Force.

Marc's brother explained that the Celestials were searching for an unlimited power source. They believed that they could make a tunnel to another reality and siphon energy from there. However, they had not calculated the possibilities for damage. When the Celestials initiated their experiment, Marc saw a rip appear in the fabric of space, which apparently went unnoticed by the Celestials. The rip glowed purple, and expanded until it filled Marc's vision completely, blinding him momentarily.

When his vision cleared, he was no longer where he was. He was in deep space, but everything was on fire. Somehow he could sense that the entire Universe was burning, and that every living thing was dying in agony. His brother appeared again and revealed that now he was witnessing events that were destined to happen five years into the future. His brother told him that this is what will occur – the end of the universe – unless Marc was able to prevent it.

Marc's third vision was the most personal. He witnessed his own birth from his point of view, but instead of a normal birth he saw himself inside a purple 'egg', which he forced his way through. When he had broken out of this egg, he found himself inside a dark cave. He cried, and a figure emerged out of the darkness – it was his brother, his real brother, as he was fifteen years ago. He picked Marc up and carried him back to his family's ranch, and he pleaded with his parents to keep the baby. Marc realised then that his parents were not his real parents.

Once Marc's visions had ended, he and the Dark Jedi arrived back on the distant planet, closely followed by Jani. She made her way to the temple to find Marc and Gabe waiting for her – Marc appeared to have lost his mind, and simply sat there clutching one piece of the orb to his chest. Jani and Gabe talked, during which time Gabe reveals that the orb had infected both of their minds, and charged them with one mission – get Marc to this place. Jani misinterpreted this and only lusted for the power that the orb promised, but despite that she still helped in that mission.

Gabe revealed that Marc was the only person that the orb would react with because the orb was the egg out of which Marc was born. Jani did not believe this story, but played along in an effort to deceive Gabe.

They were interrupted by a group of Alliance soldiers, who forced Elle to join them in the hope that she could be used as leverage to get Marc to give the orb to them. Jani and Gabe slaughtered these soldiers, and Elle hid. As the two Jedi turned to move back into the temple, Jani pulled a small dagger out and stabbed Gabe in the back. He collapsed to the ground and died slowly.

She then forcibly took the orb fragment that Marc had been clutching and united it with its other half. In this instant, a massive shockwave was sent out through the Galaxy which overwhelmed almost every Force sensitive for thousands of light years. Many of them were so overcome by this sensation that they lost their minds, and became savage, murderous beasts. This did not bode well for the battle above, as the Jedi ships – both the Grey and the Jedi Order ships – became completely erratic, sometimes firing on their own allies, and sometimes simply drifting, unmoving.

But, down on the surface, Jani was not pleased. The orb was whole again, and she could sense the enormous power held within it, but it would not let her access that power. She screamed at Marc, becoming paranoid and saying that she knew he had sabotaged it somehow. She strangled Marc, who died.

She then turned her attention to Elle. They had never liked each other, and she delighted in torturing her – Jani snapped Elle's bones with the Force one-by-one. But then she heard a deep intake of breath, and turned to see that Marc was alive again and had stood up, his eyes burning with a bright purple glow. Jani refused to give up the orb, and grabbed Elle and backed away out of the back of the temple. Marc simply walked after her, slowly.

Outside, Jani was still screaming that the orb was hers. Marc eventually spoke, only to say that 'everything you know will end'. When these words were spoken, the orb glowed again, and it blinded Jani who fell backwards over a cliff. Elle fell to the ground just by the edge, as did the orb. Marc came to his senses and raced forward, reaching out. At the last second he managed to reach them, but he grabbed the orb first and did not have time to catch Elle as well. She slipped over the cliff edge.

Marc was devastated, but he quickly realised that he could hear the sound of a ship's engines below. The Raven floated up in front of him, and he saw that Elle had fallen safely onto the hull of the ship. Marc boarded, and they quickly left the planet, which was becoming unstable, and left the battle behind.

Shortly afterwards, Elle awoke in the medical bay of the Raven, with little memory of what happened. She searched the ship and found Marc in the cargo bay, staring at the metal box which now contained the complete orb. They shared a tender moment, and Elle said that they had to find a way to destroy the orb, because it was too dangerous to be left whole.

Marc stayed silent.

* * *

_Now…_


	2. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1**

The planet drifted around its sun, as it had done for millions of years before, completely oblivious to the devastation surrounding it. And why should it be concerned? Though its surface was being racked with violent earthquakes, it was nothing that it hadn't suffered through countless times before. The battles high above its surface were not a threat to it – merely a small bit of entertainment, interrupting the planet's endless, monotonous orbit.

But for the tiny, insignificant people who still lingered there the battle was everything. The reason for them being there had gone – taken by its rightful owner, already far away from here – leaving only survival to fight for.

The _Endor_ lurched violently, struggling to cope with the much smaller Jedi ships. Though the smaller ships weapons fire would not cause significant damage to the much larger Endor, the more time passed the higher the possibility that a stray energy blast could strike a critical system. The crew wanted nothing more than to leave that place – many of them had not wanted to go there to begin with. But, at that point, they were still unsure of the fate of their Admiral, who had travelled to the planet's surface an hour previously.

"Any news from the surface?" Lieutenant Kendall, who had taken temporary control of the Endor in the absence of the Admiral and his Commanders, asked. The communications officer indicated that there was none.

Kendall sighed. She knew that the longer they stayed the more danger they were in, and all of the signs were that the planet below was now lifeless. Their Admiral was almost certainly dead, along with the two dozen men and women that he had taken with him. So what was she to do? Should she wait, and fight for his honour? Truth be told, she had hated the man; he was arrogant and cruel, and, in her eyes, he stood for everything that the Alliance fought against.

But he was her leader, and his last words to her were an order; "If you don't hear from me", he had said, "then you had better come and find me".

She rubbed her hands hard on her face. _Shit_, she thought. She couldn't believe she was about to do this. She stood, suddenly. "Alright", she said, reluctantly. "We have to go look for him. Tell security to meet me in the hangar bay. We'll land, do a quick sweep and, if we can't find him – or his body – we'll leave".

The crew – she had already started to think of them as _her_ crew – looked at her with sympathetic eyes. They all knew that it was too dangerous to go down there, even to look for members of their crew, but they also knew that if she didn't at least try to find the Admiral then all that would be waiting for her on Coruscant was a court martial.

She strode off the bridge, desperately trying to appear calm and confident. In truth she was anything but; everything she knew about warfare had been rendered useless against these… _insane_ Jedi. She tried to mentally piece together the sequence of events that had led them to this situation. The Admiral had told them of a weapon which he said could help the Alliance win the war. The boy… Marc, was it? He was the key. They had hunted him down, chased him and his companions across the Galaxy. When they had finally caught up with him his so-called _friends_ gave him up seemingly without hesitation.

He had been wounded when they had brought him in, but the Admiral had ordered that he be woken immediately. His screams of pain had reverberated throughout the ship – when Kendall closed her eyes, she was sure that the screams were still there, haunting them. The Admiral had yelled into the boy's face, trying to force him to give up the location of the weapon. It was clear to everyone – except, apparently, to the Admiral – that the boy knew nothing; his wide-eyed, confused face was enough to convince them of that. But the Admiral continued to press him until he passed out again.

And then it was the turn of Marc's companions to be interrogated. Kendall had not been present then; she had returned to the bridge, sickened by what she had seen. It was that moment that she began to suspect that the man she called her superior may have been insane.

What happened next was still a blur; the ship came under attack from a ship, but there was nothing on the ship's sensors. Some kind of stealth technology. They were boarded, and a small army of battle-droids had been released onto the ship. Most of the crew flew into a panic – most had never experienced hand-to-hand combat, many had never experienced any kind of combat outside of training. It was left to the few who kept their heads to fight, and they weren't enough.

The droids pushed them back, occupying large sections of the ship. A lot of people died; people Kendall knew, and cared about. But then, just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped; the droids all shut down simultaneously. It wasn't long after that they realised why; the man who had let the droids loose on them had got what he came for. Marc had gone, and so had the two companions who were with him. A rescue attempt, then, or a kidnapping? It was impossible to say.

The ship was readied quickly – the _Endor_ was an upgrade of an old Star Destroyer, and the one good thing about them was that they were simple and easy to repair. The losses to the crew were more damaging; from that point onward they had survived with a skeleton crew.

Kendall had tried to reason with the Admiral; there was no way that the ship could operate properly with a skeleton crew. She… _strongly _advised that they return to the nearest Alliance planet and be refitted before even attempting to acquire the weapon that the Admiral so desperately wanted. But he refused, and Kendall wasn't surprised when he did. She could sense that he was obsessed, and obsessed people very rarely see things clearly.

So they had gone to the planet – a planet that had no name, no history and was barely on the map. No one had been there, it seemed, for thousands of years. So when they arrived and found someone else already there before them it came as something of a surprise. The Admiral hadn't even bothered to order a scan before giving the order to destroy the ship, which the crew followed without hesitation.

It was shortly after that when things started to go wrong. They were joined by a small fleet of ships form the Jedi Order, who were, on the surface at least, cooperating with the Admiral in his quest for this mysterious weapon. He had taken some of his security team – and the girl who they still held in the prison cells – and travelled down towards the planet's surface.

Almost as soon as his ship had left the docking bay, several Rebel ships, accompanied by a few ships from the Grey Order, arrived in the area. Before anyone could react, a blinding glow had emanated from the planet – purple, bright and all-consuming. It left everyone dazed and confused.

Their confusion was added to when, without warning, the Jedi ships began to attack one another – and the Endor. All attempts to communicate with them failed; it was as though they had all lost their minds simultaneously.

A quick glance across the battlefield revealed that the same thing was happening to the Rebels and the Grey Jedi too. _And what did I do as a responsible leader? _Kendall thought to herself as she walked. _I ordered us to open fire on the Rebels – the one group of ships that _weren't _attacking us. _She had regretted giving the order immediately, but she also knew that once she had given it there was no going back. They would have to fight the Rebels, between dodging laser blasts from both sets of Jedi, and she knew that the _Endor_ would win. Now the Rebels had retreated, and they were left to pick up the pieces.

And that was the situation that she found herself in, having to risk her own neck to try and rescue a man who, if she was being honest, was a prick.

As she approached the hangar bays the small group of security personnel who had bothered to turn up saluted her, half-heartedly. They didn't want to do this anymore than she did.

"OK, men", she sighed as she approached. "At ease. Now, I know that none of us want to go down to that planet, but you all know why we're going". She glanced across their nervous faces; they knew, alright, but she decided to say it just to make sure. "If we don't try to rescue the Admiral, then we'll be court martialled when we get home. So, here's what we're going to do. We're going to land as close to where we last heard from him as possible, look around briefly, hopefully find the bastard's rotting corpse, and then high-tail it back here and leave this hell-hole behind forever. OK?"


	3. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

The tension on board the ship was palpable during its quick descent through the atmosphere. The violent volcanic eruptions were spewing thick smoke and as high into the sky, making navigation difficult, but they emerged close to the location of the Admiral's homing beacon.

As they prepared to exit their ship, the ground shook violently, as though the planet itself was trying to warn them off. They carried on regardless, hoping that the ground beneath them would hold until they returned. Though they had landed as close to the signal as possible, and they quick-marched the entire way, it still took them several minutes to reach the canyon in which the ancient temple was located – several minutes too long, in Kendall's opinion.

As they entered the canyon Kendall caught sight of something poking through the newly fallen ash. It was a purple flower – its petals had been crushed by the pressure and charred by the heat of the ash which had fallen onto it. It was strange… even though she had seen her own crew killed, and was frightened that her own life would be snuffed out soon, she was overcome with an almost uncontrollable sadness when she saw this broken flower.

She knelt down beside it as the others gathered around her, reaching out her hand and stroking the few petals which still clung to the stem. She stayed there for… one minute? Two? Afterward she couldn't recall exactly, but she realised that they needed to move. She stood, heart-broken at having to leave the flower in the state that it was, and walked away fighting back tears.

Those tears quickly turned to joy; as they moved further into the canyon she realised that the floor was covered with thousands – perhaps millions – of flowers, each just as beautiful as the last. She smiled as she walked through them, taking special care not to trample any.

Another object came into view. Kendall recognised it immediately, even from a hundred yards away; it was an Alliance shuttle, presumably one of the two which were stolen from the _Endor_'s hangar bay during the droid attack. While many of the _Endor_ crew, including the Admiral, were unsure whether the attack by the Dark Jedi and his droids was a rescue attempt or a kidnapping, Kendall was convinced of the former. Why else would they have stolen two shuttles, instead of simply leaving on a single shuttle?

She briefly wondered which of the two this was, though she knew that ultimately it didn't matter; both shuttles had come to this planet. There was no doubting that.

She glanced back at one of the security team that was following behind her. "Go in and check it out", she ordered. "See if it's salvageable". She looked around the canyon – the sides now stretched hundreds of feet into the air around them. _If we have to make a quick exit_, she thought_then finding this ship might prove a stroke of luck_.

She glanced inside; equipment was strewn across the floor, torn from its place. It looked like the ship's landing was especially hard; either the pilot had encountered some unknown difficulty, or they simply didn't care if they made it down in one piece.

One of the men with her approached her and saluted. "The ship's systems appear to be functioning normally, ma'am", he said.

She nodded. _Good_, she thought. _Hopefully we can salvage this and our own… but now we've got a closer fall-back._ "Let's keep moving", she sighed, and trudged on.

The temple came into view shortly afterwards; it was concealed around a corner, so by the time they saw it they were almost on top of it. It was quite beautiful, Kendall thought as they climbed the old, broken stone steps towards the entrance. The stone that it was made from was almost… soft, as though if she pressed hard enough she could mould it into something new. Even though the stone was very dark grey, and the temple was set against the backdrop of cliffs covered in black ash, it nevertheless seemed to stand out, as though it was lit up by some kind of aura.

The entrance was surrounded by several stone pillars – most were still whole, though one off to the side had crumbled. It was there, just outside the entrance, that they found the Admiral. He was dead, along with the rest of the people that he had taken with him on this fool's errand.

Except, Kendall noted, for the young girl; her body was nowhere to be seen. Had she had something to do with this slaughter, she wondered, and made a mental note to track the girl down once they had safely left the system.

She sighed. "OK", she said. "Look around. Try to establish what happened here. Then we can leave". Behind her, the few men who were with her fanned out and, almost half-heartedly, began to search the area around the bodies. Their lack of sympathy for the Admiral made Kendall wonder; did every member of the crew hate him? She always had, but she had been too cautious to tell anyone her feelings for feat that it would make its way to the ears of the Admiral and she would be punished. Maybe everyone had felt the same way as her.

She knelt by the Admiral's still warm body, and examined the wound in his stomach. The briefest of glances was enough to tell her that it was a light-sabre wound; the unique way that the weapon pierced the flesh while simultaneously cauterising the wound made it easy to spot. So it was a Jedi that had done this, and she supposed it must have been either the Dark Jedi or the woman Jani, who had escaped from the cells on the _Endor_.

"Ma'am", a voice said nervously behind her. She glanced around without standing and nodded for him to continue. "We've found a body that isn't one of our men, and another that we…" He swallowed nervously. "Well, we can't tell if it is or it isn't".

Kendall frowned; she had been doing a lot of that lately, and lines were beginning to appear on her forehead, tainting her otherwise perfectly smooth skin. "What do you mean you can't tell?" she asked.

The man shuffled on the spot, clearly uncomfortable. "His…" he started, the hesitated again. "His head is gone, and the rest of him is so drenched in blood… it's horrible, ma'am".

Kendall sighed again. "OK", she said. "It doesn't matter so much now, anyway. Tell the others to stay away from it if they're bothered by it". She stood, slowly. "What about the body who is definitely not ours?"

"Well, he's not wearing a uniform but…" he reached into his pocket and pulled out an electronic device. He punched a few keys before continuing. "He matches the description of one of the Rebel officers on our 'Most Wanted' lists. A lieutenant _Garin_".

That was news, Kendall thought. Garin had been well known in the Alliance ranks as being a major threat; he'd led several damaging missions against the Alliance. If he really was dead then they could claim it as a victory over the Rebels. "Pack up the body", she ordered. "We'll take it back with us, confirm it's him". The young soldier saluted and then hurried off.

Kendall turned back to face the corpse of her Admiral. She knelt down beside him again, and paused. After several moments, she spat on his face. "_You got what you deserved, you bastard_" she growled.

The entrance to the Temple stood before her, gaping, enticing her in. She did something then which she knew was a mistake; she let her curiosity overpower her common sense. She took several tentative steps inside the temple and looked around. The entrance opened up into a large hall, which must have been fifty feet high. The walls were old and worn, but even from across the room she could make out the intricately woven patterns in the stone. Whoever had built this place had put an immeasurable amount of effort into its construction. A pedestal stood at the centre, but it was not holding anything.

It wasn't the patterns on the walls or the empty pedestal that caught her eye, thought; it was the body lying hunched over the pedestal which did. She could tell by the brown robe that whoever it was was a Jedi, or used to be at least. She walked slowly over to the body and knelt down beside it.

There was a deep wound in his back which was presumably the cause of his death; it looked like it had been caused by a knife. He was lying face down, so she turned him over so that his face was visible. She didn't recognise him; he was a species that she wasn't familiar with; his skin was smooth and green, like a reptilian species, but his features were clearly human. Still, his identity would be worth knowing.

She searched through his jacket, trying to find some clue as to who he was. It didn't take her long to find the light-sabre strapped to his side. _Strange_, she thought. _I can't imagine anyone other than a Jedi being able to kill another Jedi… so why didn't they take his light-sabre? And why is his wound from a knife and not another light-sabre?_

These questions weren't important, but they burrowed into her head nonetheless. She continued to search through his robe. The only other thing she found was a small recording device which was kept in a pocket on his chest; it was barely five inches long.

Before she could examine it further, a massive tremor suddenly caused the ground beneath her to shake violently. She shoved the device in her pocket and, as the walls around her began to crumble, she hurried outside.

When she was out she did not stop – she ran right past the others and away from the temple. As she ran she turned her head. "Come on!" she screamed. "The temple is coming down, you idiots! Get away from it!"

She saw their panicked faces and knew that her words hadn't sunk in, but before she could turn back the roof of the temple caved in, and its walls quickly followed. She was engulfed by black dust which had shot up into the air, and it filled her lungs. She coughed as she struggled to move back to where the temple had stood – she knew that her team hadn't got far enough away, but there was a chance that one or two of them had survived. The tremors still racked the planet's surface, and the ground close to her began to split, spewing forth red hot lava from beneath the surface. As the smoke cleared she gradually saw the scene of devastation that remained – there was nothing left standing, just a huge pile of rubble.

Kendall searched for survivors for a few minutes – it was as much as she dared, but less than they deserved, she knew. Reluctantly, and racked with guilt, she had to turn away and return to their ship – she walked in a daze, barely reacting to the fresh eruptions happening all around her. She arrived at the ship they discovered, still being prepped by two of the team who had been left behind. When one of them asked where the others were, she simply looked at him with her devastated eyes; they gave him all the answer he needed.

She fastened herself tight into one of the passenger seats, and as she closed her eyes the tears started to flow; though Kendall tried to keep up a tough persona, she cared for the people she served with, and there had been far too many deaths recently.

The ship left the planet's surface – which still shook violently – and floated gracefully into the air. Kendall barely registered the movement; she was picturing the faces of the people who had died, trying to make sure that she never forgot their faces.

Her thoughts were interrupted soon after. "What the hell..?" she heard a voice in front of her say. As she opened her eyes, the first thing that registered was how bright the stars outside seemed. She looked around the cockpit – the two men with her were both staring intently at one of the front consoles, shocked expressions on their faces. Harper, she remembered, was the name of the one on the left. And the one on the right was… Daniels? She thought that was his name.

She stretched her arms above her head. "What is it?" she sighed. Daniels motioned for her to come forward and look at the monitor. When she did so, she immediately saw what had caused their surprise. The monitors were showing the shuttle's sensor readings; specifically, the readings they were getting from the _Endor_. And they were… _wrong_.

"This can't be right", Kendall said, frowning. She pressed a few buttons on the panel, telling it to run a self-diagnostic, but the results came back the same. The sensors clearly showed that the _Endor _was adrift; its engines were dead, and there was barely any power reading coming from it. It simply floated in an unstable orbit around the planet. _How can this be?_ she thought. _We've been gone barely more than an hour_.

The ship came into view less than a minute later, and it confirmed the sensor readings. The external lights were completely dead, and it drifted with its front point facing downwards towards the planet.

Something else that bothered her greatly was how quiet the surrounding area was. When they had left the _Endor_ was in the middle of a battle with half a dozen Jedi ships, but they were now nowhere to be seen. She couldn't believe that they could have overpowered the _Endor_ alone. Unless…

"Scan the exterior", she ordered. "Look for damage to the hangar bay doors". Harper nodded and accessed the controls in front of him.

A few moments later the readings appeared on the screen. "The hangar doors have been almost completely destroyed", he said. "At least we'll be able to dock with them".

Kendall stood. "Yeah", she said. "Us and anyone else who wanted to. They must have been boarded; those ships couldn't have caused this much damage from the outside". She paused then, briefly considering her next move; she knew that they had to investigate the ship, even if it was crawling with enemies.

"Ma'am", Harper said hesitantly. "I don't know if this matters, but it looks like an escape pod has been launched since we left".

Kendall sighed. "Run a quick sensor sweep", she ordered. "See if it's still nearby. In the meantime, take us in to the ship". She turned and moved back to the seat that she had previously occupied and waited.

As their shuttle neared the _Endor_, they heard the familiar sirens which indicated that they had been caught in the ship's tractor beams; now they were relying on the _Endor_ to guide them safely into the hangar bay, assuming those systems were still working properly. As they passed through the massive hole which used to be the _Endor_'s hangar bay doors, Harper turned around to face Kendall. "I've done a sweep of the area", he announced. "The missing escape pod is floating several hundred thousand miles away".

"It'll have to wait", Kendall replied. "Keep the shuttles sensors locked on it, and leave them active after we've landed. At least that way we'll still know where it is once we've got the _Endor_ back under control". As soon as she'd finished speaking, there was a loud thud and the shuttle shook, indicating that they'd just landed.

"Life support seems to be working OK", Daniels announced. "We should be good to go".

Kendall stood, a serious look on her face. She unstrapped the blaster rifle that she had by her side and held it against her chest. Nervously, Harper and Daniels followed suit.

"Be ready for anything", she said.


	4. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

Once they had climbed into their space suits, they exited the shuttle. The area outside was eerily quiet – though they had lost much of the crew when the ship was overrun by enemy droids, they still carried enough people to fill the ship. The corridors that they were now passing through should have been bustling with activity.

They passed through several pressure doors before Kendall decided that it was safe enough for them to take off their helmets. She wasn't prepared for the coldness of the air, and she drew a sharp intake of breath as it hit her. The lights were off, save for the tiny blinking backup lights, which made the corridors seem as though they hid danger around every corner.

But despite their nervousness, there was nothing there; no crew, no enemies. They passed several inanimate droids – left-overs from the attack which hadn't been moved into storage yet. Kendall couldn't help but smile as she watched Daniels and Harper inch their way past the dead droids, keeping their eyes and their blasters on them at all times. None of them had any power and their programming had been wiped when the Dark Jedi had moved out of range, Kendall knew, so it was impossible for them to suddenly come to life.

Still… they added to the eerie atmosphere which now dominated the ship. They had to find out what had happened here. "Let's head for the bridge", she said, and led the way forward.

* * *

The bridge was several floors up, and the elevators were not working. It took them almost half an hour to crawl their way through the bowels of the ship to make it to the right floor. They crawled out from a hatch in the side of the wall and Kendall immediately knew that something was different. The lights here weren't just out of power, they had been ripped away from the walls, along with most of the other electrical systems. Sparks of electricity shot from exposed wires, and as they made their way further along the corridor towards the bridge they saw stains of what looked like blood along the walls.

And then they head it; the most horrific noises that Kendall had ever heard. It was the sound of madness, the sound of something that has no mind, and only knows hatred. There was slurping, and growling, and clawing.

It was coming from just around the corner that they were approaching. Kendall stopped and looked at the two men who were with her; their eyes were wide and their faces frightened. She knew that in the state they were in they might not be any use in a fight. She motioned for them to stay put, and stay silent; she would scout ahead and see what was waiting for them.

As soon as she poked her head around the corner she regretted the decision; the corridor ahead was densely packed with writhing bodies, climbing over each other in a desperate attempt to get to the door to the bridge. It looked like the emergency blast door had been lowered to block their path, but the deep scratch marks etched into it suggested that these… _monsters_ would not relent until they had forced their way through.

Is this what had become of the Jedi who had once been their allies? The Jedi who were once so regal and mysterious? They had been reduced to their most basic primal instincts, and had been infected with insanity. Kendall caught sight of some of their faces; many were badly scarred, as though they had been scratching at each other to desperately try to get ahead.

When she had decided that she'd seen enough she returned to where Daniels and Harper were waiting.

"Is there any other way onto the bridge?" she asked, deliberately avoiding telling them what she had seen. "That way's blocked off".

The two men thought briefly before answering. "There's the heating shafts", Daniels suggested. "Normally anyone who tried getting through them would be fried, but with the heat out maybe there's a way through".

Kendall smiled weakly. "Lead the way", she said. Daniels led them back along the corridor to a maintenance hatch, which he yanked away from the wall. Kendall looked at the tiny hatch sceptically.

"It opens up inside", Daniels offered. "We'll only need to crawl for about ten yards. I think".

"OK", Kendall said. "What happens if the heating systems aren't as offline as we think?"

Daniels hesitated. "Well…" he started. "If it reactivates while we're in there then we'll all be burnt to a crisp. But I can't see it happening – the heating system is meant to be constantly running. It would only shut down if something catastrophic happened to it, and it looks like that's exactly what's happened".

Kendall moved forward towards the hatch and slowly climbed in. "I'll scout ahead", she said as she did so. "If it's safe I'll give you the all clear. If it's not, I imagine that my blood curdled screams will let you know".

Inside was exactly as Daniels had described it; the thin, metallic maintenance tube lasted for barely ten yards. It opened up into a vast heating pipe – cylindrical, perhaps five yards in diameter. There were no lights save for the occasional blinking light of a control panel. There was no walkway – Kendall figured that when it was designed they never expected people to have to walk along it – so they had to edge their way along cautiously.

The next hatch they came across must have been close to the bridge door. Through it they could see the legs and feet of perhaps a dozen of the attackers, scrabbling to get past each other. Kendall saw the quizzical expressions on Daniels' and Harper's faces, but she quickly motioned for them to stay silent. The last thing they needed was for a bunch of homicidal Jedi to start chasing after them.

They passed by in silence.

It took them barely a minute to get to the next hatch, which they saw immediately opened into the bridge. Kendall took a brief look through the grate; the bridge looked deserted. _Damn_, she thought. _Where the hell are the crew?_

Kendall shifted around so that she could push against the grate with her feet. It didn't take much force to send it crashing to the ground. She pushed herself forward, through the newly opened gap.

The bridge was almost pitch black, but there didn't seem to be any damage – in fact, there was no signs of battle. The bridge was vast, usually occupied by two dozen people all focussing on their own little jobs. The command chair – which Kendall had been keeping warm since the Admiral left – was at the centre on an elevated platform, overlooking the front consoles and the view screen. Usually it would be brightly lit, with hundreds of flashing lights from the various consoles.

Kendall still saw no movement. She stood slowly, and the others followed her out nervously. She took a tentative step forward.

Suddenly, a round of blaster fire whizzed inches past her face. She dived for cover behind the nearest console and grasped her own blaster tightly in her hand. Daniels and Harper were still on their stomachs, in cover. She raised her hand, and indicated for them to stay put.

Who was firing at her? It couldn't have been the Jedi – they were too far gone to use the weapons that they had, so she found it hard to believe that they would suddenly start picking up blaster pistols. So that left only one option.

"Hey!" she called out. "It's Lieutenant Kendall. Who's out there?"

Kendall waited patiently. There were a few moments of silence, and then she heard hushed whispers coming from the far corner of the room.

"K… Kendall?" a nervous voice called out. "Is that really you?"

Kendall recognised the voice. It was Sergeant Bowes – the _Endor_'s communications officer. "It's me, Jack", she called out, trying to keep her voice calm. "If I stand, do you promise not to shoot at me again?"

"Oh, crap!" Bowes cried. "Sorry! I thought… I thought you were one of them. Of course… I promise not to shoot at you".

Kendall smiled thinly. She'd always liked Bowes – he was a klutz, and he always had a habit of speaking his mind without realising that he was doing it, and on a ship filled with people tripping over themselves to avoid upsetting anyone, that was refreshing. She stood slowly, her hands raised, her blaster hanging loosely from her right.

The first thing she noticed about Bowes was his eyes – they were red raw. He'd clearly been crying, and he looked like he was about to burst into tears again. There were some others with him – she recognised some, but not all. This couldn't be all that was left, could it?

"Daniels and Harper are with me", she said calmly, before motioning for the two crouched men to stand, which they did. Kendall moved around the console that she had hidden behind and moved closer to Bowes. "What happened here, Jack?"

His eyes widened. "It…" he started. "It was _horrible_! A few minutes after you left they suddenly started to ram their ships into us! They took out the hangar bay doors, and then they just flooded in. We couldn't stop them!" He was in danger of becoming hysterical – even the people who were with him were leaning away from him.

Kendal raised her hands and motioned for him to calm down. "OK", she said, soothingly. "It's going to be OK".

Bowes raised his blaster again. "How is it going to be OK!?" he screamed, waving his weapon around like he didn't realise it was there. "They killed the entire crew! We're all that's left! They swarmed all over us, and dragged people off into the bowel of the ship! You didn't hear the _screams_. They were eating people alive!"

Kendall rushed forward suddenly, grabbing the weapon from Bowes' hand and pushing him to the floor. She knelt beside him and pressed gently but firmly on his chest, making sure he understood that she didn't want him to move. "Calm down, Jack", she said sternly. "We have to stay calm, and save those that are left. OK?"

Bowes stared up at her, his eyes still wide. But he nodded, and Kendall decided to let him up. She'd have to keep an eye on him, though, in case he went off again.

She turned to Daniels and Harper. "Well, boys", she said. "Any suggestions?"

The two men simply stood there, Harper with his arms folded across his chest. Harper shrugged, but Daniels looked like he was mulling something over.

"What are you thinking?" Kendall asked him.

He scrunched up his face, as though he was reluctant to speak. "Well…" he said. "I don't think the _Endor_ is salvageable. I'd say our only option is to head back through the heating valve and make our way to the escape pods. And we can't leave the _Endor_ here for others to find, so…"

Kendall sighed. She had already come to the same conclusion, but she'd hoped for another option. They had to set the self-destruct off. "Shit", she sighed.

* * *

Daniels smiled. "Yeah", he replied. 


	5. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

They sent Harper off first, with the survivors – including Bowes. Daniels and Kendall were left alone on the bridge.

When Kendall decided that they'd given the others enough time to get away, she moved to the command console.

"You ready for this?" she asked Daniels.

"No", he replied bluntly.

Kendall laughed bitterly. She knew that they didn't have a choice, but the thought of destroying the flagship of the Alliance fleet frightened her. She gritted her teeth and input her command codes. Once she had done so, all that was left was to hit the 'Activate' button.

She looked at Daniels and smiled. "We are so getting fired", she said.

Daniels snorted. "What do you mean 'we'?"

Kendall rolled her eyes. "Asshole", she said, and hit the button. "It's done. We've got five minutes before this whole ship goes bye-bye. Plenty of time". _I hope_, she mentally added.

The ship's sirens blared all around them as they ran back to the hatch that they had emerged through. There was no hesitating this time as they sprinted along the valve. Kendall led the way, running about three yards in front of Daniels. They'd barely moved ten yards before Kendall heard a loud cry behind her. She stopped and turned quickly; Daniels had fallen to the ground, grabbing his ankle. He cried out in pain again, and Kendall's first instinct was to yell for him to be quiet.

But the damage was already done. Before Kendall could react, a dozen hands burst through a grate in the wall close to where Daniels had fallen. Those hands were followed by the crazed faces of their attackers. As Kendall began to run back towards Daniels, they began to claw at his legs and feet, dragging him slowly towards them.

Daniels cried out, this time in fear rather than pain. He looked towards Kendall, who was still running towards him, and stretched his hand out towards her. "Help me!" he cried as he was dragged through the hole. Kendall dived forward, her hand stretched out towards him, but she was too late. He disappeared through the grate barely a second before she could reach him.

Kendall lay there panting for a few moments, but then the air was pierced with a horrifying scream. _No_, she thought. _No, no, no._ For one insane moment, she was ready to dive through the hole after him to try and drag him away from those monsters. But instead she climbed reluctantly to her feet, tears beginning to stream down her face, and continued running in the opposite direction.

She clambered out into the main corridors at the exact point at which Daniels, Harper and her had first entered them. The escape pods were barely twenty yards further along the corridor, but as soon as she had emerged she heard dozens of footsteps begin to move towards her. It seemed like her presence was no longer hidden; before she could start to run, a crowd of growling former Jedi rounded the corner, heading straight towards her.

She instantly readied her weapon and began to fire at them, taking several of them down. But the others simply trampled over the fallen and carried on towards her, screaming with rage. She sprinted away from them, towards the escape pods. When she got to them her attackers were barely five feet away; she dived head first inside the nearest, and hit the launch button as hard as she could. Then she whirled around to face the now closing door of the escape pod and fired at the enemies which reached her before the door closed.

One of her pursuers managed to reach their hand inside the escape pod before she could kill it; it lay dead with its arm hanging inside. The door closed on top of it, crushing it and severing the arm. Blood spurted all around the pod, and the arm fell limply to the floor.

Kendall sat, breathing heavily, blaster still clutched tightly and pointed at the door. Her heart was racing, and she was in shock. The violent lurch of the pod's launch shook her out of her daze somewhat, and she began to weep uncontrollably.

The pod drifted away from the _Endor_, leaving behind the chaos that still raged there. Kendall simply lay on the floor, unmoving. She was trying to calm herself down, trying to tell herself that there was nothing else she could have done to save Daniels. But that wasn't true; she could have reacted quicker, she could have fired her gun at the _monsters_ that had grabbed him. Why hadn't she fired her gun? She couldn't explain it… she must have panicked.

She stared down at the blaster pistol that she still clutched in her hand. She could have saved him, she told herself, but she didn't, and she'd have to live with that for the rest of her life.

The pod was suddenly bathed in bright light, interrupting Kendall's dark thoughts. It came from the _Endor_, which had just begun to self-destruct. The hull began to rupture violently across the middle of the ship, tearing it in two. Small explosions set off one by one, and the ship separated into two. The rear half drifted for several moments and then erupted in flame, sending a blinding light shining out into the darkness of space. The shockwave shook the escape pod, sending it spinning away briefly before its thrusters stabilised it once more.

The front half should have followed suit, and should have exploded at the same time. But it didn't; it simply drifted slowly down towards the planet below, trapped in its gravitational field. The self-destruct must have partially malfunctioned, Kendall thought distantly. She watched as the front section of the ship fell towards the planet, getting faster and faster as it got further away. She watched it until it was just a tiny speck, and then until she couldn't see it at all.

The remains of the _Endor_, which must have measured a mile across, impacted on the planet's surface in the centre of a land mass, sending hellish fire spiralling high into the air. From where Kendall's pod was floating all that was visible was a tiny red spot, which flickered on the otherwise dead surface briefly before dissipating.

She sat still for what seemed like a lifetime, staring down at where the ship had crashed. She thought it had been beautiful – beautiful destruction, and horrifying.

"…please respond", a voice suddenly crackled through the pod's communicators. "I repeat, if you're out there, Lieutenant, please respond".

Kendall stood and slowly moved across to the communicator. She leaned forward and spoke. "Kendall, here", she said quietly. "That you, Harper?"

"Oh thank God", Harper cried. "Are you OK? Is Daniels with you?"

Kendall closed her eyes, not wanting to answer. "I'm fine", she said, wearily. "Daniels… he didn't make it. I'm sorry".

There was a long pause then, and Kendall started to think that maybe he was so angry with her that he'd cut her off. But eventually Harper spoke again. "…Understood", he said, his voice trying to hide his sadness. "At least some of us made it. We're floating a few thousand miles away from you. What do we do now?"

Kendall honestly didn't know. The closest planet was days away, and they had no food. They had few choices; they could land on the planet, which was still highly unstable, or they could set off away from here and hope that they came across someone before they all starved.

Then she had an idea. "Harper", she said, slowly. "Do you remember where the other escape pod was? The one that was jettisoned before we got back to the _Endor_?"

"Vaguely", he replied after a brief pause. "Why? You think they knew something we don't?"

"I don't know", she said. "But I don't see any other viable options. Send the coordinates to each pod and tell them to start towards them as soon as they can". She switched off the communicator before Harper had chance to reply, and sat down in the single chair that occupied the front of the pod. She punched in the coordinates and sat back in her chair, her eyes closed.

Her hand moved up her body; she enjoyed the sensation, and with her eyes closed it felt a little like someone else was touching her. In her mind she imagined that Daniels was there with her, still alive; she would make love to him, and they would spend their last days in each other's arms. The thought made her warm, and she smiled.

As her hands moved to her side, she felt a hard lump by her hip which brought her back to the cold reality of the empty escape pod; she was alone. She put her hand into the pocket and her fingers rubbed against a cold, metallic object. She took it out and looked at it; it was small, and at first she didn't remember what it was.

Then she remembered the dead body inside the temple, down on the planet's surface; it seemed like a lifetime ago that she had found this recording device on him. So much had happened since then, nothing seemed important any more.

Kendall wasn't interested in what the device held, but she knew that she had nothing else to do other than wait to die. She activated the device, set it down on the console in front of her and laid back with her eyes once more close.

After a few seconds a voice began to fill the empty space; a man's voice, warm and gentle. Kendall wondered if it was the man whose body she had found.

It said: "_If anyone is listening to this, then it means that I've died. That's good… I think… at least I don't have to struggle any more. I don't know who is listening, but I hope that it's you, my love._

"_Did we see each other again before the end? Did we talk about all the things that we loved together? Did we meet as friends or enemies? Was it you who killed me? I'll never know the answers to these questions, and that's not a bad thing. I prefer to spend eternity as I am now; enlightened, with a sense of _hope_."_

On the planet's surface, the damage caused by the front half of the _Endor_ crashing to the ground was still reverberating across the planet. A tidal wave of hot ash had shot up in the air and spread out in all directions, causing a storm which threatened to engulf everything that was.

"_I hope that I explained to you… and that you understood. We were both victims, you and me; the end of our lives will be nothing but tragedy. And I'm so sorry… so sorry that it had to be this way…"_

The massive pile of rubble that had once been an ancient temple stood in silence, as still as it had been before the arrival of the people who had caused its fall. The only movement was the occasional cloud of dust that was blown into the air by a passing breeze; it seemed as though nothing would move here again. This planet was dead.

"_The things I've seen… have you seen them too? Did you understand them as I did? Everything will end… the whole Universe. The boy Marc is our destroyer, and life's salvation. If you still live, and you hear this, I beg you to help him any way you can. Try to overcome the temptation that you no doubt feel, and just… help him"._

Beside the remains of the temple, a cliff stood perhaps two hundred feet high. At the bottom of the cliff, some of the stone rubble of the temple had fallen. It was then that the slightest of movements occurred; merely a shudder at first, one tiny rock rolling down the side of a larger stone. Then the larger stone rolled to the side, and a broken and bloodied hand emerged through the rubble.

"_I hope you understood. Even if you didn't, please… try to understand this;_

_I love you Jani"._


	6. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

Two days earlier, and in an altogether different part of the Galaxy…

Ossus was mostly barren wasteland – plant and animal life were scarce, and the twin suns pulling on the planet caused unpredictable and sometimes violent seasons. It had not always been this way. Ossus was a place of history – the first port of call for a newly formed group of Jedi, taking their first tentative steps outward into the unknown Galaxy. It was a beautiful place – the blue sky would be lit up each day, bathed in the light of its two suns. And the night times were just as spectacular. Two moons circled the planet, one bigger and closer than you could imagine – so close that, if the sky was clear, you could see the light of the few settlers who had made it their home. People came from all corners of the Galaxy to visit Ossus. Many of them came for the Jedi, who had adopted it as their second home, but many more came for the sheer beauty.

But it couldn't last. The Jedi had many enemies, and Ossus became one of their major targets. Most recently, the Sith attempted to annihilate all Jedi, and Ossus was one of their first targets. But the most devastating mark was left by the Yuuzhan Vong war. They came seemingly from nowhere, bent on conquering all that they encountered. Ossus was almost wiped clean – millions were killed on the planet, along with trillions more throughout the Galaxy. The Jedi Academy which had been standing in the same spot on Ossus for centuries was burned to the ground. The Galaxy barely survived.

But survive it did. It _thrived_. People rallied together like never before, helping to rebuild much of what had been destroyed. The Jedi Academy was rebuilt, and within two decades it was once again bustling with young Jedi eager to learn the ways of the Force.

One such youngling stood out amongst the others – though he shuffled amongst the shadows, trying his best not to. He was tall, his hairless and spiked head projecting an air of hostility which was at odds with the calmness in his eyes. His grey skin suggested lifelessness, but anyone who knew him – and there were very few willing to – knew that this boy was more alive than most.

His name was Jad, and he was a Yuuzhan Vong. He was the only Yuuzhan Vong ever to join the ranks of the Jedi.

After the war had ended, the surviving Yuuzhan Vong separated in two. The more hostile, primitive ones retreated back to where they had come from. But there were many more who felt that they needed to evolve as a species – their voices initially drowned out by the majority, they now found that they had a platform to spread their message. Jad's grandparents, and his parents after them, were part of this group. They felt that the only way to survive was to join the galactic community peacefully, and learn as much as they could about other cultures.

His parents, taking this ideal to heart, gave their child up at a very early age, imploring the Jedi to take him in. They applied to nearly all of the Academies, and were rejected at every one. Until Ossus. Something was different about the masters on Ossus – they were much more eager to accept him than… _anyone_, really. It was something that he thought about a lot. He contemplated what it might mean as he left his lodgings that morning.

There was a cold breeze which rustled the trees and the grass. Though much of the planet had been devastated, leaving a barren wasteland, this place had been chosen for redevelopment. The Jedi in particular were determined that this place would regain its former glory. So they organised a replanting and rebuilding effort, even going as far as terraforming part of the planet so that its atmosphere and weather systems mimicked how they once were. And, of course, the Academy had been rebuilt. The brown buildings sat well with the nature surrounding them, representing the harmony between man and nature that was a part of the way of the Light.

The Light… Jad thought often about what the Light was. His masters told him of honour and selflessness, of heroes past and battles for good.

He knew that the other students hated him. Or, more precisely, they hated what he was. The Yuzhaan Vong war was distant memory, but it was still memory, and the ill-feeling towards his people would take centuries more to dissipate. Sometimes they would throw insults towards him, surrounding him like a pack of wolves while spitting their vile. They called him _monster_, _murderer._ He stayed silent, and tried as best he could to stay hidden – skulking in the shadows, hiding in his room whenever he could. To him, the Light represented exposure to the danger and the hurt, and he wasn't sure he wanted anything to do with it.

He headed for the temple, keeping his eyes low. It was past time for his morning lessons, and he knew that his master would scold him for being late. The Jedi Temple rose high above him, stretching a hundred feet in the air. The Great Archway welcomed any visitor – a massive marble door, which stood ever open. The building was made of grey stone and tinted glass. Its shape was odd – it reminded Jad of a beetle's shell, curved and uneven. Ironically, despite it standing as a symbol of the rich history of the Jedi, it was the only construct here which was at odds with the nature surrounding it. For millennia, it had been store house for Jedi secrets – secrets of the Force, and of history. It too was nothing more than a replica of what was there before the wars had ravaged Ossus, and much of what had once been hidden there was now lost.

Jad passed under the Great Archway, already uncomfortable around the bustle of people who were always there learning or meditating. Beyond the archway was the Great Hall, which contained statues of the first Jedi – the men and women who had first ventured away from Tython, the Jedi's original home world, and who settled on Ossus. Jad knew that the statues likely bore no resemblance to the people that they symbolised, but he felt proud when he gazed upon them; they reminded people of the rich history that the Jedi had, and that they were always striving to discover new things. He often thought that he was privileged to be a part of their legacy.

He hurried towards his master's study, which was far towards the back of the temple, away from the noise of the crowds. The door to this room was the same as all the others; plain and wooden, with a small brass handle. But beyond… Jad knew that there were scrolls and artefacts concealed inside that room which people would kill to acquire, if they had known they were there. Though the original Jedi Temple had been destroyed, and most of what it contained lost along with it, some pieces had been salvaged and the majority of them lay in the hands of Jad's master.

He knocked once on the door before gently pushing it open. As usual, the room looked as though a bomb had hit it; papers, some which looked ancient, lay scattered across the floor and the tables, strange artefacts and florescent potions were dotted around. The old Jedi was sat at his desk, his face buried in an ancient scroll as it so often was. He was a strange looking thing, Jad thought. In many ways he was the opposite of Jad; short where Jad was tall, full of life and colour where Jad was dull and grey. No one knew what his species was called, or where they came from, but there had been many great Jedi who shared his features. As Jad approached, his master's large ears bristled. His eyes appeared over the top of his book, narrowed in mock surprise.

"Hmmmm", he said – a noise which simultaneously conveyed annoyance and amusement. "Glad you could make it finally, I am". He hopped down from his chair and walked slowly round so that he was in front of Jad, using his walking stick to keep his balance. He looked up into Jad's face. "Forget about your lessons, did you?"

Jad bowed slightly. "I'm sorry, master Bora", he mumbled. Then they both stood in silence for several moments, Jad shuffling uncomfortably under his master's stern gaze.

Finally, Bora spoke. "No excuses, have you?" he asked. "No tales of adventure to prevent you from reaching here on time?"

Jad smiled in spite of himself. His master was teasing him, he knew. "No, master", he said, speaking more clearly now.

"Hmmm. How disappointing that is. Always enjoy a good story". His master turned around suddenly and made his way towards a tall bookshelf in the corner of the room. He appeared to study it for a while, before waving his hand and using the Force to move a book from the top shelf, which floated gently down to him. "Learn about the Force Wars today, we shall", he announced. "Important part of our history, they were. Many things to be learned".

Jad had already read a great deal about the Force Wars – he was always interested in learning about the history of the Galaxy – and he told his master as much.

"Have you now…?" Master Bora asked with a smile. "Discuss, then. Not learn. Tell me about them, you shall". His master leaned back in his chair and rested his hands together on his lap. Though Bora was much smaller than most, the furniture and the room itself was the same size as for everyone, and he looked as though he would be swallowed up by the tall chair that he sat in. Jad often wondered why his master did not simply acquire smaller furniture, instead of struggling to cope with those which were too tall for him.

Jad thought briefly about how to respond to his master. "Many thousands of years ago, when the Force had only recently been discovered, the Jedi lived on a planet known as Tython. Back then the Force was thought of as purely a religion. People were divided into two groups based on which God they worshipped. Those who would become the Jedi were followers of _Ashla_, which would later become the Light side of the Force, and the Sith were followers of _Bogan_, which would later become the Dark side of the Force.

"The conflict went on for ten years. There were no light sabres at the time, so people fought using swords which had been augmented using the Force.

"Anyway, the followers of _Ashla_ eventually came out on top. They would later form a peacekeeping force which was known as the Jedi, and they left Tython seven centuries later, eventually settling here on Ossus".

Master Bora sat listening intently as Jad spoke. When he finished, he leaned forward slightly. "Hmmm", he said. "What was the cause of these wars?"

Jad frowned, confused by the question. "Um…" he hesitated. "One group followed the Light, and the other followed the Dark. War was inevitable, wasn't it?"

His master hopped down from his chair and limped slowly around to stand next to Jad. Though Jad was sitting himself, Bora still had to look upwards into his face. "A difference of opinion, then?" he said, amused. "Just cause for war, do you think?"

They heard a noise to the side of them. Bora didn't look around – he had already sensed that they had a visitor – but Jad did. It was master Draven, the only human master on Ossus, stood in the doorway with a smile on his face. When he saw that he had been noticed he pulled an innocent face. "Please", he said, waving his hands. "Don't let me interrupt the lesson". Then he looked directly at Jad, who could sense the coldness and hostility in him despite the smile. "So what do you say, boy? Is differing opinion just cause for war?"

Jad hated being called boy, but he felt no need to confront Draven. Instead, he turned back to his own master. "Um…" he hesitated again. "Aren't all wars caused by a difference of opinion?"

His master smiled. "They are", he sighed. "But not an answer to my question, that is". He closed his eyes gently and slowly turned to face master Draven, so that his back was facing Jad. He waited for Jad to respond.

Jad sighed. He wondered whether his master wanted him to answer honestly, or, given the presence of master Draven, give him the answer that the Jedi wanted to hear. He chose the former. "I don't think there is a just cause for war", he sighed. "War is abhorrent. There is no reason that justifies the slaughter of people, especially not just because you think something they do not".

Master Bora still had his back to his student, so Jad could not see his face. If he could, though, he would see that his master was smiling. But then Bora's attention shifted to the other master in the room; it was no secret that the pair did not see eye to eye, and Jad felt uncomfortable with the idea that he would be sat in the middle of another of their arguments.

"Why do you come here, hmmm?" Bora asked. "Council's decision made, it has been. No more reason to talk". Draven simply smiled in response, and moved further into the room. Bora watched him, as a sheep might watch a circling fox, but he made no move to stop him. Even when Draven began to rummage through the scrolls which were laid out on Bora's desk, he did not speak – it was well known how protective Bora was of the secrets contained in his scrolls.

Draven responded without looking up. "We're making a mistake", he declared. When Bora didn't respond he finally looked up. "The rest of the Jedi Order have fallen in with the Alliance, and the Greys have fallen in with the Rebels. Why do we insist on remaining neutral?"

"With which side should we ally ourselves?" Bora asked, his voice becoming agitated. "Or not matter does it?" He sighed deeply, as though disappointed, and walked closer to Draven. Jad remained still, his head lowered. He wanted nothing more than to stand up and leave, but he knew his master would not forgive him for doing so. Then his master spoke again. "Why so desperate to wage war, are you? Not content with simply _living_?"

Anger flared in Draven's eyes. "I want to end this war!" he growled, advancing on Bora. "People are dying out there and you and the other masters insist on forcing us to sit here and do _nothing_. We should be setting an example, and making a difference!"

Bora still remained calm, though Jad, who knew his master as well as anybody, could sense that frustration was bubbling underneath the surface. "An example, we _are _setting", he insisted. "A difference we _are _making. War benefits nobody, especially us".

"Um…" Jad mumbled, sounding embarrassed at the sound of his own voice. The two masters turned to face him, Draven wearing a look of unhidden irritation. Bora, on the other hand, simply smiled. "Why can't you go join the war on your own?" Jad asked.

Draven stood there in disgust. The question, it seemed, rattled him. He growled – a wordless, formless noise – and stormed out of the room, leaving the student and his master alone again. Jad glanced at his master, momentarily worried that his outburst had angered him. But Bora still wore the smile that he had been wearing before Draven had interrupted, and he looked back at his student.

"Leave, he does not, because he is _afraid_", Bora revealed. "A good thing for a Jedi, this is not. Because… what does _fear _lead to?"

The question was aimed at Jad, who was momentarily caught off guard. But he responded quickly. "Fear leads to anger" he said, reciting the first lesson that he learned as a Padawan. "Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to _suffering_. And all lead to the Dark side".

His master laughed then – a high pitched sound, which would have come across as condescending if it had come from anybody else. Coming from Bora, however, Jad simply felt as though he was about to learn something else. "Think you the world so black and white?" he asked. "Hmmm. Good, this is. Brings us back to our original lesson, it does. The Force Wars. Many thousands of years ago, they happened. What did we learn from them?"

Jad was still a little rattled, but he gave the question the thought that it deserved. "We learned…" he started, and then took a breath. "We learned the nature of Light and Dark. Of right and wrong. We learned that there are two sides to the Force, and that it is up to us to make sure we follow the right path".

"Light and Dark", his master responded. "Right and wrong". Then he paused, as though considering the answer that Jad had given. "Are they one and the same? Think so, I do not. Once again you think that the world is black and white. But where Light and Dark are polar opposites, right and wrong depend on your perspective". He moved closer to Jad, examining his reactions. "Not one or the other, or even two ends of a straight line. Imagine a sphere infinite in size and expanding in three dimensions. This is the Force, in all its intricacies. Nuances, there are. An unimaginable number of considerations to take, to decide what is right and what is wrong. The Light and the Dark are both capable of either. You yourself know this. Fear the Light, you do".

Jad knew that it was true, but he felt obliged to protest. "I don't", he wailed. "I follow the Light with all my soul".

Bora smiled again. "No", he said bluntly. "You do not. You fear the Light for the exposure that it brings – it lights you up, making you a beacon for your enemies to find. No, follow the Light, you do not. You follow _right_, and that is much more noble.

"But what we really learned from the wars all those millennia ago was… nothing. We learned nothing from them – not about war, or life. Barely two hundred years old, I am, and still young. But countless conflicts I have seen. Countless lives lost needlessly." He paused for a moment, as though remembering something that he would rather have forgotten, before continuing. "No, we learned nothing. Just as we learned nothing from all the conflicts since then. How else do you explain that we repeat the same mistakes?"

Jad shuffled in his chair, uncomfortable with his master's praise and his conversation. In truth, he didn't know what he really _wanted_ – he was proud to be a Jedi, he really was. But sometimes he felt these… urges. He guessed that they were a kind of primal instinct because he was a Yuuzhan Vong – some kind of innate aggression that was a part of his evolution. And he fought – and succeeded – to keep it suppressed. But he often wondered whether he would be better off just… submitting to it. Was this what Jedi felt when they were tempted by the Dark side?

Master Bora was sat silently, examining his student's face. Eventually he spoke. "A pioneer, you are", he said, trying to encourage the youngster. "A species outside the Force, the Yuuzhan Vong were, until you. Someone who not only showed an affinity to the Force, but did so in blatant conflict with millions of years of evolution. A miracle, this is, and proud you should be.

* * *

"And now… our lesson is over". Bora walked back to his chair and sat down, preparing to resume reading the scroll that he had his head buried in when Jad arrived. Jad stood slowly, still digesting the conversation that he had just been involved with. He bowed slightly and his master smiled a final time at him, before lowering his head and becoming lost once more in his reading. Jad walked out of the door.


	7. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6**

Outside, the day was still young. Even the highest of the two suns was barely above the trees which surrounded the Academy. He hadn't realised it before, but his master's words had made him feel… jovial. Happy. He strode around the Academy grounds with a new-found confidence, no longer seeking out the shadows. The feeling wouldn't last, but he was determined to enjoy it while it did. And he knew who he wanted to enjoy it with.

The Academy was surrounded by beautiful natural beauties. Everyone knew that they had been put there to disguise the devastation which lay just beyond them, but that did not detract from their beauty. And Jad's favourite place was a lake, just a little south of the Temple – it was surrounded by lush plant life, with flowers of every colour of the rainbow. There was only one patch of flat grass where people could sit and relax, and many of the older Jedi often used it as a place to meditate. The lake itself was vast – at least a hundred yards in diameter – and the water was so clear that you could see the fishes flittering about beneath its surface.

That was where Jad headed now, though he had no interest in simply staring at the lake. Usually he was too self-conscious to go there during the day but there was someone that he wanted to see, and he had a feeling that they would be by the lake.

He saw her almost immediately – it was as though she _shone_, brighter than anyone around her. She sat with her back to him, maybe twenty yards away, but still he recognised her instantly. _Shi'ara_, was her name, and she was his only friend – the only person, other than for his master, who saw him as a person and not as a monster. He called her name, and she turned slowly. Her face was perfect – her slightly green skin was smooth, save for one tiny mole just above her lip on the left side. She didn't see him at first, but when she did her face lit up with a huge smile which, somehow, made her even more beautiful.

They had met when Jad had first moved here, nearly ten years ago. He was five, and she was seven. The other boys used to pick on him – _Used to_, he thought. _They still do_. But she always took care of him – she was always tough, and she would fight the boys all the time. And they were inseparable, he supposed, though when he was younger he always thought of her as a big sister.

He could remember the exact moment that he realised that he was in love with her. There was a celebration – a kind of graduation ceremony for young Jedi who had become Padawan's. Both he and Shi'ara were there, although he had done everything he could think of to get out of it. It was held in the Great Hall, and it was completely full of people smiling and talking. jad had spent the evening sat in a corner, trying his best to be invisible. Until she arrived.

The moment he saw her took his breath away. She wore a flowing red dress, cut down to her lower back. Her hair, which was usually tied back, was left to hang down below her shoulders. She looked like an angel, he thought, and the way she smiled when she saw him made his knees weak.

It was the same smile she wore now, as he walked slowly over to her with a smile of his own.

"Hey", she said with a wave. "Don't see you round these parts often. What's the occasion?"

"No occasion", he said. He sat down next to her, legs outstretched with his arms behind him to support himself. "I just felt like a little bit of fresh air". He took a deep breath, savouring the rich textures of the air around the Academy. It really was a wonderful place, he thought, and life here wasn't so bad.

Then, as if to prove him wrong, he felt something hit the back of his head. Something hard and sharp, sending a pain reverberating down his spine. As he reached his hand around to feel where the pain was coming from, in the distance he heard Shi'ara screaming. "_What the hell are you doing?" _he heard. And "_You jerks_". When he brought his hand back they were wet with blood. Someone had thrown a rock at his head.

He stood up slowly and turned around to see Shi'ara screaming in the faces of a group of laughing young men. They were the same men who used to tease him as a boy, who told him that he had no right to be here.

Anger flared, coming from somewhere deep in his stomach – a place that he had tried to convince himself didn't exist. It rose through his chest and overtook his mind, and all he could think about was hurting the people who hurt him. When he saw one of the men shove his friend to the ground, laughing as he did so, he lost control. He charged towards them, his feet initially slipping on the moist grass. As they re-found their grip he got faster and faster, until he collided at full force with one of them, knocking him to the ground.

He hit him, again and again. He realised that he was screaming; a primal sound, which came from the same part of him as his sudden anger. The man's face was bloodied, even though it was only a few seconds before his friends grabbed him and dragged him away. They pushed him to the ground and started to kick him and punch him. Jad tried to keep his arms up to protect himself, but it didn't help.

Then Shi'ara got back to her feet and drew her light-sabre. There was a moment of hushed silence – it was strictly forbidden to draw a light-sabre here outside of the training grounds, especially against another student.

"And what is going on here, hmm?"

The voice was familiar, and a wave of relief washed over Jad. It was master Bora, alongside master Yushaf – a Rhodian, and the only female master on Ossus. They both wore disapproving looks, though master Bora's had a tint of amusement.

Neither Jad nor Shi'ara answered – he stood with his head lowered, embarrassed that the masters had caught him in this situation, and Shi'ara remained in a combat stance with her sabre extended. It was one of their assailants who answered, a human named Farrus. "Nothing", he said. "Just a misunderstanding". He then signalled to his friends that they were leaving, and tried to walk past the two masters. However, master Yushaf blocked their exit.

She turned her attention to Shi'ara. "Drawing a light sabre against a fellow students is a serious breach of the rules", she exclaimed. "What reason could you have?"

Shi'ara looked at Jad, who could not meet her gaze. He knew that she was waiting for him to speak, for him to decide if he wanted the masters to know what had happened. And even though he knew that she would almost certainly get into a heap of trouble, he couldn't bring himself to speak. Shi'ara waited for several seconds before sighing and looked away. The expression of disappointment on her face pierced his soul – he felt ashamed immediately. But not enough to speak up.

Bora extended his hand towards her and she took it. They then moved away, presumably so that they could discuss this incident further. Yushaf remained behind. She motioned to the group of boys to leave, and then turned to Jad.

She seemed to study him, as though she already knew what had happened here and was disappointed that Jad had not spoken. "Your friend will face severe punishment", she said bluntly. "Without an exceptional reason, there is no excuse for drawing a weapon against a fellow student. Was there an exceptional reason?"

Jad kept his head lowered, and stayed silent. He didn't know why he was so afraid to speak – perhaps he feared that if he did tell the masters about the bullies then the repercussions would be terrible.

Yushaf's snout bristled with disappointment, and she told him to return to the dormitory and get some reast. Jad wanted to ask where Shi'ara had been taken, but he did not have the courage. He simply trudged back to his room.


	8. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7**

The Academy living area was hidden away to the east of the temple. Not that it was small – far from it. The building was as vast as the temple itself – It had to be to house the hundred or so students and teachers – and the individual rooms were quite large. Each room was laid out the same – a single bed lined up against the back wall, with a desk and a bookcase to the side. There was simple cooking equipment and facilities to wash dirty clothes, but most of the meals were held in the main cafeteria which was designed to hold every person there.

Jad hardly ever ate there. He preferred to eat alone in the comfort of his own room where he could read or just sit and think. He was doing the latter now, though he didn't like where his mind was taking him. He felt guilty – he had no idea where Shi'ara was or what was happening to her. He was imagining all kinds of crazy things – what if they were torturing her to find out what happened? What if they thought she was a Sith infiltrator?

He knew that he was being stupid – master Bora was the one who had led her away, and he would never allow anything bad to happen to her. At worst, he might try and get her to drink some of his horrible green tea, which tasted as though someone had urinated in a cup. He tried to relax and get some sleep.

When morning finally did come, Jad hadn't slept a wink. He'd decided through the night that he was going to find out where Shi'ara was and apologise.

* * *

Meanwhile, on the far opposite side of the living area, master Bora's sleep was being invaded by terrible nightmares. He was no stranger to bad dreams, and he knew that they often meant nothing, but the images he was seeing seemed too real to ignore.

His dream began in familiar fashion – he saw his family. His race was uniquely attuned to the Force and it was decided before his birth that he would join the ranks of the Jedi. But when he was younger he had been full of a sense of rebelliousness that his parents were not ready for. He refused to join the Jedi, and ran away to the far reaches of the Outer Rim where, after a long courtship, he had taken a wife.

In his dreams he saw her again… and his son. They had both died long ago. When he closed his eyes at night sometimes he welcomed the sight of their smiling face, but other times he was frightened of the pain that the memories would bring.

Something different happened that night. Their faces were still smiling but their _eyes_… their eyes were different. There was madness in them that had never been there before – not in life or in dreams. And there was a strange purple glow just barely visible at the centre of their pupils. As he watched them they saw him – as they had countless times before. He knew that they would come to him and embrace him, and the idea usually filled him with joy. But now he was frightened… he knew that if they embraced him then the madness that had infected them would engulf him and he would never be allowed to escape.

His wife moved closer to him. "I've missed you", she sighed, her voice slow and soothing. As she got closer Bora could see deeper and deeper into her eyes, and what he saw pierced his soul. He saw a sun at the centre of her eye, and he saw that it had the same purple glow that he had seen before, but it wasn't the sun or the purple that his vision was drawn to – it was what was in orbit around it. He saw a massive construct circling the sun; it must have been five hundred miles from end to end. It was silver metallic, with a massive spherical structure at its centre surrounded by three equally spaced thin structures which protruded downward toward the star. As these three segments got closer to the star they became thinner until their ends became almost pointed. At the lowest point there was a bright glow – white light, tremendous energy – and it appeared as though this glow was drawing power directly from the star.

Bora knew what this was. It was a legend from his scrolls, something which had been forcefully removed from history – a legacy of a long dead and forgotten people which had led to their own destruction and, thousands of years later, almost led to the destruction of the Old Republic. And he knew that it could _see_ him.

He watched its massive frame twist and turn in his direction, and then one of its protruding arms bent upwards sending large segments of metal crashing down towards the star. The arm moved ever closer to him, and the closer it came the louder the roar in Bora's head, until the sound engulfed him completely – he knew that he could not escape.

He awoke with a short scream, covered in cold sweat and breathing heavily. He looked around his room frantically, expecting something horrible to be there waiting for him. But there was only silence – he saw the same four walls that greeted him every morning, the same desk and the same book case. He swallowed loudly and waited for his heart to stop racing.

What did his dreams mean? If he had seen what he thought he had seen, then it was… _impossible_, wasn't it? The Star Forge had been destroyed four thousand years ago, according to the archives, and only a select few even knew of its existence. So why did his dream feel like a vision of things to come?

_I must discuss this with the other masters_, he thought to himself. _Even if it is nothing, we must at least discuss its significance._ He rose quickly and dressed in his Jedi robe.

* * *

Jad, meanwhile, had also risen from his bed and dressed. He had spent several minutes simply wandering the bright, busy corridors of the Academy, trying to decide the best place to look for Shi'ara. Though he had been a resident at the Academy for ten years, he had no idea where they might have taken her – to the isolation cells, perhaps? That would seem harsh, as they were usually only used to confine violent invaders until the authorities could take them away.

Bora would have taken her to see the masters, he decided. They would have interrogated her about what had happened, and then… What? Would they have confined her somewhere? Would they have kept her all through the night? He decided that the only way he could find out would be to ask the masters.

And so he left the living area, left its relative comfort, and he headed towards the Temple once again. When the Masters weren't teaching students or meditating in solitude they were in the chambers debating. And their debating, more often than not, descended in arguments. Often the students could hear the shouts of the masters during one of their disagreements. The most recent disagreement was to do with the Academy's place within the Jedi Order. Though Jad didn't know all the details, it seemed that most of the masters on Ossus were less than pleased with the Order's decision to enter the war on the side of the Alliance. They preferred to stay neutral, as the Jedi had pledged to do years earlier.

All the masters seemed to agree. All except for master Draven, who had long been fighting to get Ossus involved in the conflict. He believed that the only way to help people was to ensure that the fighting ended. He refused to back down, and this caused long and loud arguments.

As Jad approached the chambers, however, there were no raised voices – in fact, it was so quiet that Jad thought the chambers must have been empty. As he got closer, however, he realised that he _could _hear voices, though they were only quiet mumbles.

"…can't be", he heard. It sounded like master Yushaf's voice. "It was destroyed thousands of years ago. No one even knows of its existence any more, apart from the Jedi masters".

Jad slowed his pace. He knew he shouldn't listen in but his curiosity got the better of him – perhaps they would discuss what had happened to Shi'ara. He leaned against a war, trying to look nonchalant as people walked past, and he strained his ears to listen.

"True, this is". It was Bora's voice now – Jad would recognise it in his sleep. "But a vision I saw nonetheless".

Jad heard a snort of laughter, and another man's voice. "Are you sure that it wasn't just a bad dream?" It was master Draven's voice, full of the same contempt that he had shown when talking to Jad the day before. "Maybe the stress is getting to you, Bora".

"Perhaps", Bora sighed. "Perhaps not. Why I brought the matter to the masters, this is".

Jad heard the sound of footsteps. "Even if it were true, what can we do?" A new voice – that of master Maya, a Lutrillian, who was renowned for his gentleness. "The Jedi are no longer strong enough to counter a threat of this magnitude, and the discontent between the two major military forces in the Galaxy shows no signs of abating, so we cannot rely on their cooperation. No… we can do nothing. Nothing other than wait it out and hope that you vision proves false".

"Hmmmm… Right, you are, of course". Bora sounded deflated, and… frightened? Jad had never heard his masters voice sound like that, and it worried him. What were they walking about? It sounded like something… huge. Something _monumental_. And something that could change the Galaxy.

Jad was so lost in his thoughts that he didn't see master Bora until it was too late. The two stared at each other for what seemed like a long time. Jad tried to read his masters expression – was he angry that he was hiding there? Could he sense that Jad had been eavesdropping on their conversation? Jad couldn't tell. The only thing he could say for certain was that his master was not surprised to see him.

Bora wore that familiar smile. "Been here long, have you?" he asked. His voice was jovial once more, but Jad thought that he could still sense the disappointment in his voice. "Listening in were you?"

Jad' s eyes widened. "N..no", he stammered, before composing himself. He bowed slightly. "No, master, I've only just arrived".

His master nodded, though Jad got the sense that he did not believe him. "Why do you come here, hmmm?" He walked forward slowly, and Jad fell in beside him.

"Well…" Jad hesitated. Was he allowed to ask about his friend? Would Bora be angry that Jad was trying to interfere in their business? "I was hoping to find out what happened to Shi'ara. I haven't seen her since you led her away yesterday, and I want to talk to her. To apologise".

"Apologise?" Bora said, raising an eyebrow. "For what?" Jad looked down at his feet and stayed silent. When Bora realised that his student was not going to speak, he sighed. "Talked to her, we did, and then sent her back to her room".

Jad suddenly felt very stupid. He had walked around the campus for a long time trying to think of where she might be, but he'd not bothered to check the most obvious place. His face revealed his embarrassment, and his master chuckled and left.


	9. Chapter 8

**Chapter 8**

Shi'ara had spent the night sleeping soundly. The night before had been a whirl – she remembered being overcome with anger at the group of boys who had attacked her friend. When she had drawn her light-sabre she had been more than willing to use it. In fact, deep in her soul, she knew that she had _wanted_ to use it – and that realisation worried her.

The Jedi way was to actively avoid the emotions which would lead to the Dark side – anger, fear, passion. She had always strived to follow the path that the Jedi laid out for her, and she had always been able to suppress the darker parts of her mind. Until recently.

There was… _something_ in the air. Something different. It had begun almost two weeks ago. She had been sat on her own by the lake, as she did most days. She often went down there to meditate, to try and calm her mind and focus. But that day – and every day since – her mind had taken her to dark places. She remembered the moment that her parents gave her up to the Jedi – she was four, and she had pleaded and _begged_ for them to take her home with them. Her mother had cried but her father's face had been emotionless, and in that moment she knew that it was _his fault_. He was the one who had decided to give her up, and she hated him for it.

That anger that she had felt… she and her teacher, master Yushaf, had spent many many hours trying to suppress it so that it did not dictate her actions. But every time her mind took her back to that moment the anger flared again, and each time it did she got closer and closer to the edge.

The knock at her door came as a relief, giving her a welcome distraction. Though when she opened it and saw Jad she was less pleased. "Oh", she said. "It's you".

The smile that had been on Jad's face fell away quickly as he realised that she was angry with him. She walked back into her room without a word, and Jad followed her hesitantly. He had been there many times, and each time he did there was something different about it. Shi'ara liked to create things – often simple shapes out of paper, but sometimes exquisite rock sculptures. This time, the new item in the room was a half-finished sculpture which, Jad assumed, was meant to be her master – Yushaf.

He motioned towards it. "That's really good", he said, trying to sound jovial. "Really captures her essence".

Shi'ara looked at him and rolled her eyes. "What do you want?" she asked.

"I'm sorry, OK?" he wailed. "I just… if I'd told Bora what had happened then they'd just have come back in a week and been even worse". He walked over to her and sat down next to her on her bed.

She sighed. "And that makes it OK that you let me get into trouble for it?" she said viciously – it was clear that she did not want to let it drop. When she saw the guilty look on Jad's face, however, her face softened. "Look", she said softly. "I'm not mad". Then she paused, as though rethinking what she had just said. "Well… maybe I _am_ mad. But I'll get over it, don't worry". She put her hand on Jad's head, trying to comfort him. He smiled thinly. "What really bothers me", she continued, "is the fact that they're the ones who've done wrong, and I'm the one who gets into trouble for it. And it's because you didn't want to speak up".

Shi'ara got to her feet suddenly, put on her jacket and then held out her hand to Jad. "Where are we going?" he asked, taking her hand in his.

She smiled widely. "For a walk", she said simply.

* * *

Their walk took them down to the lake again, where they spent an hour just sitting and talking. They talked about life, and about what they were going to do once they had become full Jedi. It was all stuff that they'd talked about before, but Jad enjoyed their talk regardless.

When the conversation dulled, there was only one question that Shi'ara ever asked. She spent several minutes simply staring out over the lake, before finally turning to Jad. "So", she said smiling. "Know any gossip?"

Whenever she asked this question before, Jad always had to admit that he didn't – he wasn't the type of person to seek out gossip and spread it around. But that day… he did have some gossip, didn't he? He didn't know exactly what the masters had been talking about, but it had sounded deeply important. "Um…" he hesitated, not sure whether or not to tell her. "There is one thing…"

Shi'ara's eyes lit up – any possibility of hearing juicy news excited her. "Ooooh", she sighed. "That sounds promising".

Jad was regretting saying anything. He tried to backtrack. "It's nothing", he tried. "Forget it".

"Don't give me that!" she shouted playfully. "You can't tempt me like that and then deny me! Tell me!" Jad stayed silent, avoiding eye contact. Shi'ara grabbed his arm and tugged on it. "Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me".

Jad eventually gave in. "Alright!" he yelled. "I'll tell you, just… let go of my arm".

Shi'ara grinned widely – a smile that made Jad's heart flutter. She sat back down and relaxed next to him. There was a few moments of silence before she got impatient again. "Well?" she prompted.

Jad sighed. "OK", he said. "This morning I didn't know where you were, so –"

"Hey", she interrupted. "I was in my room. I wasn't exactly hiding".

"Yes, I realised that later", he said, irritated. "Are you going to let me tell this story or not?"

Shi'ara made a mock guilty face, and then snapped her fingers together and moved them across her lips, symbolising that she had zipped them closed.

Jad smiled. "OK", he started again. "Like I said, I didn't know where you were so I went to see master Bora to ask him. Only, when I got near their chambers I overheard them talking".

Shi'ara leaned her head on his shoulder. "And you thought that, instead of doing the decent thing and leaving, you'd just stand there and eavesdrop?"

Jad pulled a face. "Yes, pretty much", he admitted. "Anyway… They were talking about something. A vision that master Bora had, I think". This piqued Shi'ara's interest, and she sat up and started to pay attention. "They talked about some kind of threat. Something that – according to master Maya, anyway – the Jedi aren't strong enough to fight. Something… _ancient_".

Silence fell for almost a minute. "So", Shi'ara said finally. "What is it?" Jad looked at her and shrugged. She pulled an annoyed face and hit him gently on the shoulder. "Well", she said. "Whatever it is it's nothing to do with us". She stood up and stretched her arms high into the air. Then she glanced back at Jad and, without warning, started to walk away.

Jad watched her briefly, assuming that she would stop and come back. When he realised that she wouldn't he quickly rushed to his feet and hurried after her. "Hey", he called after her. "Where are we going?"

She glanced back at him and smiled. "I want to show you something", she said mysteriously. She led him towards the back of the lake, and into the thick trees that lay beyond. Jad started to get a little suspicious – it was forbidden for students to leave the Academy grounds. The planet's surface beyond was dangerous and unstable. And it was fenced off – a point that Jad made to Shi'ara.

She laughed. "Yeah", she said. "And I'm not smart enough to figure out a way past a damn _fence_". She pushed a large branch out of the way and beyond it they could see the fence. She led Jad to a point where someone had cut a hole – it looked like a light-sabre cut. "Ta-daa", Shi'ara said. "As if by magic we have a way through".

Jad hesitated. "But…" he said. "It's against the rules".

She rolled her eyes at him and simply walked through the gap, leaving him alone to contemplate his next move. After a moment he followed after her.

* * *

The surface of Ossus was, for all intents and purposes, dead. The three hundred square yards on which the Jedi Academy and Temple were built were terraformed – at great expense – by the Jedi Order with the intention of restoring at least some of the planet to its former glory. But every other part of the planet was a barren wasteland – there were occasionally relics of what had been there before, or ruins of old buildings, but there were no plants or buildings which still stood.

Jad and Shi'ara emerged from the comfort of the trees into a savage wind, lashing their face and whipping the ash from the ground into a ferocious whirlwind. Jad tried to cover his face with his hands, and when that didn't work he hunched his jacket over his head and used it to shield himself. This exposed his arms, though, and he already regretted following Shi'ara out there.

Shi'ara, for her part, seemed more used to these conditions and – almost absent mindedly – raised her hand in front of her face. "Come on", she shouted over the wind. "Follow me".

The pair trudged through the ash – which seemed to Jad to get deeper and deeper as they walked. Shi'ara seemed to be leading him towards a mountain in the near distance. Jad had often looked out at the mountains, which protruded above the trees, and wondered what else was out there; they were the only part of the outside world that they could see from the Academy. When he was a child he thought that the mountains were stuck to the top of the trees – he couldn't wrap his head around the idea that they were so much further away.

He had been trailing a few steps behind Shi'ara since they had exited the Academy grounds. He shuffled faster so that he was now walking next to her. "So", he said, calmly. "Where are we going?"

She glanced sideways at him. "Patience", she said loudly. "We're almost there". She pointed to something in front of them. Jad squinted, struggling to see through the swirling ash. He could just make out the opening to a cave near the foot of the mountain, which he presumed was what Shi'ara was pointing towards.

It took them another ten minutes to reach the cave. As they passed through its mouth, Jad felt a rush of relief as the ash fell away and its relentless assault on his exposed skin ended. He allowed his jacket to fall away from his head and back around his shoulders, and he rubbed his sore arms. He sighed, loudly. "Damn", he breathed. "My arms are going to be red raw in the morning".

"Oh, stop complaining", Shi'ara replied. "Come on, it's just through this opening". She walked away, quickly, and Jad strolled after her.

He was still concentrating on his arms as he passed through the small opening behind Shi'ara, so at first he didn't see what she was leading him through. "I hope this will be worth it", he said, petulantly. "My skin's been sanded to the bone". Shi'ara didn't answer, but Jad quickly lost interest when he realised what he was surrounded by. He felt the ground change under his feet – it had been hard rock inside the cave, but he slowly noticed it soften and become moist. He looked down. It was grass.

Shi'ara smiled as his mouth dropped open. Though there was an abundance of plant life in the Academy, it was all artificially grown and then moved into a suitable place – even the grass there was grown especially. The atmosphere of Ossus had been polluted by battles and disasters too much for life to ever occur naturally here.

At least, that was what all the scientists had said. But here he was; in a cave which was covered in grass. And not just grass; as he lifted his eyes upwards he saw one astonishing flower after another – one which had bright pink petals at least two yards across, another with thorns as sharp as swords. And he realised that his eyes were being bathed in light – it looked as though the sun was at the roof of this cave, but he knew that was impossible.

He pointed upward. "What…?" he started, but was unable to form the rest of the words in his mouth.

Shi'ara smiled a knowing smile. "I honestly don't know", she said, and she moved over to a large rock and sat down, leaning against it. "I stumbled across this place about a year ago. I've been coming here every few days – when I get a chance to slip away. It's beautiful, isn't it?"

Jad sat down next to her. "It's… the most beautiful thing I've ever seen". They spent a few moments in silence, breathing in the fresh air. Shi'ara gently rested her head on Jad's shoulder, and Jad's heart skipped a beat. "It's also impossible, isn't it?" he added after the moment had passed.

Shi'ara nodded – her head was still resting on Jad's shoulder, and when she nodded her hair rubbed against it. "Yes, it is", she sighed. She sat up and looked Jad directly in the eyes. "This place proves that science isn't always right. Even the Jedi gave up on this place – once they'd restored their precious Academy they just left the rest of the planet to rot". As she spoke, her face became more and more angry.

"Don't you mean_our_ precious Academy", Jad said with a nervous smile. He could sense that Shi'ara was really angry about something, but he couldn't really understand what it was.

She laughed bitterly. "Yes, sorry", she spat. "_Our_ precious Academy". Her face softened slightly. "I just get frustrated at how arrogant we can seem sometimes. It's like as long as we have what we wanted, everything else doesn't matter".

They sat in silence for what seemed like a long time, simply looking at each other. Jad was nervous – he always was when she sat so close to him. Suddenly, and without warning, she leaned in close and kissed him passionately on the lips. Her lips were warm and wet, and she tasted sweet. When they finally parted, Jad wore a shocked expression that made Shi'ara laugh loudly.

When she stopped, she put her head back on his shoulder. "Stay here with me for a while, OK?" she asked.

Jad nodded slowly. There was nowhere else he would rather be.


	10. Chapter 9

**Chapter 9**

Master Bora sat in his study. Unusually, his head was not buried in a book. Instead he sat completely still, lost in thought. Though he had accepted the other master's decisions about his vision, the memory of it still bothered him. He thought back to all the horrible things he had experienced in his two hundred year life – while he was too young to remember the fall of the Galactic Empire, he remembered the fear and suspicion that plagued the galaxy during the years after that as the New Republic (which would eventually become the Alliance) hunted down and executed the remaining remnants. The Empire would cling to power – which was symbolised most by dominance over Coruscant, the Galactic Capital – for almost a decade after the death of its Emperor.

He remembered the Yuuzhan Vong war – during which trillions of lives were lost and over a dozen species across the Galaxy were made extinct. He had survived one of the Great Jedi purges, and his parents had survived another.

And yet… none of these things had ever affected him like his most recent vision had. It wasn't just the images that he had seen – the massive space station, surrounded by thousands of battle ships. No, he had seen that happen before, and not just in visions, and had stood unwavering. It was what he could sense _underneath_ the images that had shaken him. Something… something was telling him that the most dangerous threat would go completely unseen, and that it would bring about destruction unlike anything anyone had ever experienced. But what was it? Why couldn't he see it?

He closed his eyes and rubbed his head. All this worrying was giving him a headache, and he decided to take a walk around the grounds. The suns had set almost an hour before, and the Academy was lit by soothing yellow lights and the glow of the moons. He as he left the temple he turned to look at it, admiring both its grand designs and its countless nuances. In many ways, he thought, it served as a metaphor for the Force.

If a person stood far enough back and looked at the Force as a whole, they would see nothing more than a source of power – an unimaginably _vast_ source of power, to be sure, but nothing more. But those who lived in and with the Force learned of the endless intricacies and tiny secrets to find, and learned to shape it around their own lives and wishes.

Suddenly, a coldness gripped his heart – like someone had stabbed him through the heart with a freezing cold steel blade. He grunted and clutched at his chest, fighting to stay on his feet as his vision became blurred. Through the haze, he looked upwards. He had studied the stars around this planet for a long time, and he believed that he had made himself familiar with all of them. He saw a stranger in his sky that night – a most unwelcome stranger, corrupting the night sky. It was a purple glow, flickering, reaching out across the Galaxy and into Bora's head.

He was overcome by a high pitched screech – clutching at his head, it took several seconds for him to realise that he was screaming. He stumbled backwards, crashing into another person who had been stood close by. He barely registered them at first, though he saw that they, too, were clutching at their heads. Whatever this was, it was affecting not just him but everyone on the planet.

And then it was gone – the glow in the sky had dimmed, as had the pain in his chest and his head. He tried to take a few moments to steady himself, but before he could he felt arms wrapping around his small frame. The man who had been stood near him – a student, Bora realised later – was scratching at Bora's face and eyes. His eyes were blood shot, full of madness, and he screamed as he leapt at Bora – a noise of pure hatred and fury the likes of which even Bora had never heard. Bora was so overcome with shock that he failed to react quickly enough – the student managed to get a grip on Bora's arms and, a bewildered Bora looking on, he sunk his teeth into Bora's shoulder.

Bora screeched in pain – a pain which, finally, shook him out of the daze that he had been in. He grunted again and waved his hand towards the student, knocking him several feet backwards and off his feet. Bora drew his light-sabre – something which, long ago, he had sworn never to do – and prepared to fight off any more threats.

* * *

Jad's vision returned slowly – his ears were ringing, and his eyes were blinded by tears of pain. As he slowly regained his composure, he frantically looked around, trying to see Shi'ara – was she alright? Had she felt the same overwhelming pain that he had? Why was it so dark all of a sudden? He had to squint through the darkness, but he thought he could make out the shape of someone a few yards away. It must be Shi'ara, he reasoned, and he stumbled towards her.

She stood with her back to him, unmoving. Jad reached his hand towards her, but before he could touch her she began to turn slowly. He could sense something was wrong even before he saw the blood dripping from her eyes – the pain had caused her blood vessels to burst. She no longer looked at him with recognition; rather, she looked at him with twisted lust, but not for his body – for his flesh.

Jad didn't understand any of this. He inched closer towards her swaying figure – she still seemed placid, though even in Jad's dazed state he could sense her hysteria bubbling beneath the surface. He reached his hand slowly towards her, and her eyes – filled with madness – followed their path. She frowned, slightly; as though she couldn't remember what it was she was looking at. Before Jad's hand reached her she screeched – a high pitched, painful sound – and leaped at him.

They collided and Jad tumbled to the ground with her on top of him. Her hands scratched at his skin, and she moved her face in close as though she were trying to bite him. Jad grabbed at her face and tried to hold her away from him. "What…" he mumbled, still not understanding what was happening. "What are you doing?" He tried to push her away – gently at first, as though he thought she was only fooling around. When she did not withdraw he began to shove her away more aggressively. Unfortunately, the only difference this seemed to make was to make her even angrier. She continued to claw at him – at his eyes, at his ears, at any exposed flesh – and Jad screamed.

When he screamed Shi'ara recoiled as though she had been struck, but then quickly continued her assault. She dug her teeth deep into his neck. He grabbed her hair and tried to yank her head away, but her teeth had pierced the flesh – he realised that if she didn't loosen her grip then she could tear a chunk out of his neck. He felt her try to do just that, and he shifted from trying to yank her away to trying to force her to stay close.

He didn't know what to do. She clearly meant to kill him – that much was now beyond even his own doubt – but he didn't know if he had the stomach to fight her off. If he could get her away from him then at least he could make a run for it, but with her teeth still firmly dug into his neck he didn't see any way of getting the opportunity.

His eyes darted around, trying to search for anything that would help him. They eventually fixed on a rock lying a few feet away from him. He took a deep breath, and then tried to shuffle himself close enough to grab it. As his body moved Shi'ara began to growl – a primal noise, filled with nothing but raw emotion. _She's lost_, he thought to himself. _Shi'ara is no longer here. There is no intelligence left behind her eyes. She is like an animal now._

A few moments later his hand wrapped itself around the rock. He hesitated. _Is that true?_ he asked himself. _Or am I just trying to justify what I'm about to do?_

He closed his eyes, silently praying to whatever gods were listening for some sort of divine intervention – for Shi'ara to suddenly come to her senses, or for her to loosen her grip on him. But no salvation came. Instead, he twisted his head so that his mouth was as close to her ear as he could get it, and then, even though it hurt him, he whispered one word. "Sorry".

His arm swung around in one quick movement, the rock connected with the side of her head. Blood burst forth from the wound that it made, and the grip that Shi'ara had on Jad's neck loosened enough for him to shove her away. She groaned and tried to attack him again, though all she could do was crawl slowly towards him. She was dazed, Jad saw, and her balance and her vision were almost gone.

He stood, slowly, and stared down at her. Her face was twisted into a horrific mutilation of the gentle, perfect image that it had been before. He knew that he couldn't save her… that she was already gone. Tears began to seep from his eyes as he realised that the most merciful thing he could do was to end her suffering – to put her out of her misery. His grip tightened on the rock which he still held in his hand; grey, save for a tiny splattering of Shi'ara's blood, and solid.

His face, twisted with anger, stared down at the struggling form of what was once the woman that he loved. He raised the rock high above his head, ready to bring it down on her skull…


	11. Chapter 10

**Chapter 10**

"This way, young ones. Stay close".

Master Bora had cobbled together a small group of Jedi and Padawan who were unaffected by whatever had hit them; they were mostly younglings, a few not even in their teens, and they were all terrified. Bora tried to keep up an air of confidence, trying to calm the others down, but in truth he was just as frightened.

He thought back to the moment that it had hit; a horrifying sensation had simply… invaded his mind, delving into the darkest places of his soul and dragging them to the forefront of his mind. Things which he hadn't thought about for a long time he suddenly couldn't get away from; the death of his wife and child, almost a century ago, was foremost among them. He kept seeing his wife's face staring up at him, begging him to help her. And he didn't… he _couldn't_, and he has regretted it ever since.

He shook his head, hard, trying to bring his focus back to the here and now; this definitely was not the time to worry about the past. The present was enough for them to worry about.

Immediately after he had fought off his first attacker, he had still been in a daze; he wandered around the grounds, seeing things that had seemingly come straight from a nightmare; students that he used to teach he'd seen eaten alive, teachers he used to respect he'd seen ripping through flesh with joy on their faces. When he had come across a rare survivor, he had simply gathered them in. It had been perhaps an hour and there was now a small group of them – perhaps seven or eight.

But they didn't have a plan. Bora knew that staying out in the open was a mistake; if he'd been thinking clearer earlier he probably would have headed straight back into the temple instead of wandering around the Academy grounds. He still believed that the temple was their best choice; it would be full of people, most of who, Bora thought sadly, would now be monsters. But at least inside they could lock themselves away in a room and hide.

This wasn't an ideal plan; the temple was located at the centre of a wider open area, separate from the rest of the buildings which made up the Jedi Academy. This made it a kind of centrepiece – an attraction that many people would travel half-way across the Galaxy to see. It also made it impossible to sneak into – there were no hiding place. If they were going to get inside they would have to cross maybe fifty yards of open space.

Bora knew this. He also knew that if one of those… monsters caught sight of them then they would be swarmed quickly.

They were sneaking between the dormitory buildings, working their way through the maze formed by those cracks. It had allowed them to stay hidden, so far.

"M…master", one of the younglings said nervously from behind Bora, who was leading the way. "Where's my mom? Are we going to go and find her?"

Bora closed his eyes; he had been dreading the moment when he would have to explain to them what was happening. The boy's mother was likely dead, or worse, she might be one of the _turned_. He hated himself for it, but he felt the lie form in his mouth before he could stop it.

"Waiting for us, she is", he mumbled. "See her soon you will". The older students looked nervously but knowingly at each other. Bora could sense their disapproval, but none of them volunteered to tell the boy the truth. Which came as a relief, as Bora knew that they were approaching what might prove to be the most dangerous part of their short journey.

He raised his hand, motioning for the others to stop. He peered out across the temple grounds – even now, with the horror of what was happening, it still looked beautiful; there was a large lake just in front of the building, with a fountain at the centre. The area was covered in the greenest grass you could ever hope to see, and trees which swayed in the breeze.

Most importantly, it appeared devoid of any life, and devoid of any threats.

Bora turned to face the others. "Listen closely", he whispered. "It appears empty, but dangerous it still is. Follow me exactly, you must; if I run then you run, if I stop you stop. Do you understand?" The older students nodded vigorously – their faces were masks of fear, and Bora silently worried that if they panicked they could endanger everyone.

The youngster who had asked about his mother started to cry. Bora moved slowly over to him – even though the child looked barely eight, Bora stood eye to eye with him. "Shhh…" he whispered. "Calm yourself, youngling. What is your name?"

The boy sniffed, and rubbed his eyes. "J… Jake", he managed.

Bora smiled, trying to put Jake at ease. "Well, Jake", he said. "A Jedi, you are, hmmm?" Jake nodded slowly. "And Jedi do not fear, do they?" Jake shook his head. "So steel yourself and follow, and safe you will stay. Okay?" Jake nodded again.

Bora moved back to the front of the group and cast one final glance over the empty space in front of them. It was definitely empty, he decided, and there didn't appear to be any threats. He glanced back at the others and motioned for them to follow him.

He moved out tentatively at first, glancing all around, convinced that something would leap out at them from behind a tree or a building. Ten seconds passed without incident, and they had moved perhaps five yards. Then twenty seconds passed with no threat presenting itself. Bora increased his pace, the others following suit. Then, barely a few seconds after, he broke into a run.

They reached the Great Archway and passed through without slowing down. Once they were all inside, Bora waved his hand and the temple doors, which had stood constantly open since it was rebuilt, closed with a loud thud.

Bora allowed himself a moment to relax; they were inside the temple. They were safe.

But even that moment proved too long. He heard a _screech_ from behind him – high pitched and terrified. Bora knew who it had come from before he even turned around. It was Jake, and they had him.

Perhaps a dozen of them had moved up behind them, quietly, and grabbed Jake. One of the monsters – a woman who used to work in the gardens, though Bora had long since stopped thinking of them as people – had dug her nails into the boy's face, causing deep scratches which seeped blood. Jake twisted and struggled to escape her grasp, but he couldn't escape.

The other students began to scream, and Bora had already raised his light sabre and begun to move towards the woman, but before he got two steps she lowered her hand from Jake's face to his neck and, in one swift movement, tore a large chunk of flesh away. The wound exposed Jake's oesophagus, and he made loud wheezing noises as he tried to take breaths.

Bora's light sabre tore through the monster's skull, and sliced away the top half of her head. It hit the ground just after Jake's lifeless body, and Bora was already screaming. He rounded on the remaining monsters, who until then had been content to stand back and watch. He dived towards them, rage in his eyes, and cut away at them. None of them stood a chance. Some of them tried to escape, but Bora dived on them and put them down.

When the last of the monsters had died, leaving nothing but a pile of bloodied remains, Bora stood for several moments, breathing heavily.

He turned, still raging inside. He had never struck out in anger before – not even when his wife and son were killed. That had been the most difficult time of his life, but still he turned away from the Dark Side. But this… this was beyond anything he had ever experienced. He felt powerless to prevent the deaths of those around him, and his frustration had reached boiling point.

But when he saw the frightened faces of the students who were still alive… he felt ashamed of himself. He was meant to give them hope, to be a role model for the Light. But he had succumbed to his inner rage; how could he then tell them not to?

He simply looked at them, and they avoided his gaze as though frightened that he might strike out at them. He sighed and moved over to where Jake's lifeless body lay. One of the… _monsters…_ had fallen on top of him, and Bora struggled to roll it away. Jake was surrounded by a pool of blood, his face contorted in shock and pain, as though he were still trying to comprehend what had happened to him. Bora knelt beside him and gently closed his eyes.

This seemed to relax the others, and one by one they moved forward to join Bora beside their fallen colleague.

After several moments of silence, the sound of more footsteps echoed along the corridor, along with the now familiar growling that told them that they were enemies. Bora stood quickly and ushered the others along another corridor. After taking one last look at Jake, he hurried after them.

He led them towards his own room. The door was made of flimsy wood, and he knew that it would not hold them off on its own. He opened the door and told them to get inside, which they did in a hurry. Then, unseen, he took the key from his pocket and closed, locking them inside and himself out.

Within a few seconds he heard banging from the other side, and frightened voices. "Stay calm", he called through the door. "Safe, I will keep you".

He turned away to face the oncoming attackers, and he raised his glowing blue light-sabre high into the air and prepared for one final battle.

* * *

Close by, down beyond the lake, where the Academy grounds ended, there was a small gap in the fence. All was quiet, eerily contrasting the chaos that was unfolding in other parts of the Academy. Still, that is, until the fence rustled and a figure emerged through it. It stumbled forward several yards before collapsing to the ground.

It was Jad.

A sandstorm was raging just beyond the wall, and Jad had walked through unshielded; the skin on his face had been worn away by the sand, and blood trickled from the open wounds. But he didn't flinch, or act like he was in pain. He simply laid on the ground, staring up into the blackening sky, a distant look on his face.

He watched as the clouds crept slowly across the sky, and wondered briefly why he had never looked at the sky before. He wonders why his head hurts so much… what had he just been doing? Where had he been? Everything was hazy… and when he tried to remember his head throbbed like nothing he'd felt.

There had been a… garden… in a cave? No, there couldn't have been; there's nothing outside the Academy by devastation, and plant life out there is impossible. He must have imagined it. But then… why was he out there? He rubbed his face, and felt the sting as his hands pressed against the worn away flesh. He pulled his hands away, and stared at them, looking at the blood as though he couldn't understand it.

He heard the sound of a body moving along the grass nearby, but his mind didn't register it. He let his hand fall to the floor, and started to cry. The sounds came closer – it sounded as though something was dragging itself along the ground, and it was punctuated by the sound of raspy breathing. But still Jad did not register it – he was in a daze, still staring at the sky.

A face appeared in his vision; first the tip of its head, and then slowly its features came into view one by one. Jad frowned, and tried to look around it, mildly irritated that it had blocked his view of the sky. He felt warm liquid hit his face, and for the first time he looked at the face above him – drool had fallen from its mouth. He recognised that face, didn't he? The snout was familiar… it was master Yushaf. Or what was left of her.

Jad raised his hand and gently stroked the side of her face. He didn't know why he did it, it just felt right. He savoured the warmth of her breath on his cheeks, and for a moment he thought he saw a look of recognition in her eyes.

Jad saw a burst of light hit the side of her head, and it exploded in a shower of blood. Her body fell limply onto his. Jad closed his eyes, wrapped his arms around her body, buried his face in what remained of her neck and began to weep uncontrollably.

He heard voices then; distant, unimportant. "What the hell is he doing?" one of them said in the distance.

"He must have lost his mind…" another said, with pity in their voice. "What shall we do with him?"

Jad heard footsteps approaching then – coming closer and closer until he could sense them right by his head. He moved his tear filled eyes away from the remains of master Yushaf and stared upwards at the figure stood by him. He thought that he recognised the man, but his mind wouldn't let him remember.

Whoever it was, they stared down at him with disgust and contempt in their eyes. "It's only the Yuusan Vong", the man said coldly. "We should just leave him here. Maybe this monster will slow down the other monsters".

"Master…" the first voice protested. "We… we can't just leave him here! We're Jedi, for God's sake! Just because all hell's broken loose doesn't mean we can forget that…"

Jad watched as the man who had been stood over him turned and walked away. "Fine", he said as he walked. "Then you can carry him".

Jad felt hands grasp his arms and pull him upwards. He let them carry him – it didn't matter who they were or where they were dragging him. His head was still pounding – he moved his hand to his face, and felt the blood which had covered it. Green blood… from what was left of Master Yushaf. He moved his fingers gently down his face, savouring the feel of them and leaving a green streak. And then he blacked out.

When he awoke next he was no longer being carried. Instead he lay on hard floor, curled into a ball. Someone had draped a robe over him to try and keep him warm. He allowed his head to fall sideways, and he realised where he was; the Great Hall in the Temple. It made sense, he knew; the Temple was the easiest building to defend, as it only had one entrance which was reinforced. He saw two figures in moving nearby – one who he didn't recognise, and another who he unfortunately did. It was master Draven, and he was staring straight at him with a look of open hostility. It was Draven who had suggested that they leave Jad to the monsters.

He sat bolt upright suddenly, startling the young boy who was sat next to him.

"Crap!" the boy yelled, before realising what had happened and calming himself. "Man, don't do that to me. I'm close enough to having a heart attack as it is!"

Jad's eyes didn't move from Draven – he met his gaze and returned his hostile look. "Sorry", he mumbled.

"Woah, and you're talking too!" the boy said in surprise. "Seriously, we all thought you'd lost it. Hell, who could blame you. I'm Jake".

Jad forced himself to take his eyes off Draven and he turned to look at the boy. He was human – blond, tall and with a soft, smiling face. He looked about eleven or twelve. He'd extended his hand, and was waiting patiently for Jad to take it. Jad wasn't used to people smiling at him. He nervously took the boy's hand and shook it, and the smile on Jake's face widened.

"Um…" Jad mumbled. "Jad".

Jad looked around at the others – Draven had now turned away, and was looking at something that was just out of Jad's sight.

"What are they doing?" he asked.

Jake glanced over at them and then back at Jad. "We're trying to get to the back of the Temple", he replied. "Master Draven thinks that they would be the best place to hole up, but something is blocking the corridor. They told me to stay back here… I don't think it's anything nice".

Jad smiled weakly and climbed to his feet. He walked towards where master Draven and the other man were, meaning to confront him, but as he got close to them what they were looking at came into view, and it made Jad stop dead in his tracks.

It was a pile of bodies – perhaps three dozen of them – and it was blocking their path to the back of the temple. Jad stared, mouth open, at the scene of horror in front of him – blood had formed a pool on the floor which had spread out around them, and he could see that Draven's feet were covered in it, leaving red footprints wherever he walked. it suited him, Jad thought.

"Well", Draven said, his gruff voice cutting through the tension like a razor blade. "You're finally awake. And you're not dribbling like an invalid, either, which I didn't expect. Congratulations".

Draven's words went right through Jad, who was still in shock. "What happened here?" he asked. "Did those monsters do this?"

The other man – who was old… at least seventy, with white hair and a massive scar down the right side of his face – turned to look at Jad. "No", he said, his voice old and frail. "These people were killed with a light-sabre – see how their wounds are cauterised? The monsters seem to use their hands… or their teeth". Jad moved forward slightly to look at where the man was indicating, and he saw the wounds. "No…" the man continued, thoughtfully. "These people were killed by a Jedi. And look at the way they're all leaning _into_ the corridor, like they were chasing after something. My guess is whoever killed these people is on the other side of this pile of bodies".

Draven shoved Jad harshly and strolled past him. "We've been moving the bodies, trying to cut a path through", he growled. "Now that you've finished your beauty sleep, how about lending us a hand?"

Jad moved forward slowly – in truth, the thought of touching a dead body terrified him, and he would have done anything to avoid it. But Draven was staring at him… watching him… _judging _him… If he even tried to worm his way out of this, then he would be nothing but dead weight to him. So he reached his hands out, tentatively, and grabbed the nearest body. He pulled – hard – and the body slid easily out from the pile. Jad dragged it across to another part of the Great Hall, where others had been dragged before by Draven, and he left it there.

It took them an hour to move enough bodies to make their way through. When they decided to move, Jad moved back over to where Jake had been sitting patiently.

"Hey", he said softly, and the boy looked up at him with a smile, though his eyes were tired. "We're moving through to the back of the temple now, where it'll be safer. But there are… things that you shouldn't see on the way through. So I want you to take my hand and close your eyes, and just… trust me. OK?"

Jake nodded nervously, and he extended his hand towards Jad who took it in his. He led Jake over towards the corridor where Draven and the old man were waiting. He followed them through, being careful to lead Jake around the bodies which remained there. Jad noticed almost immediately that there were no lights back here.

"Why's it so _dark_?" he asked. "Is the power out?"

"No", Draven said quietly. "The power's fine… looks like someone deliberately destroyed the lights back here. Give themselves a better chance of hiding".

Behind them, in the darkness, shadows moved unnoticed. A figure emerged, ready to attack, and Jad heard the familiar sound of a light-sabre extending. He swung around, his hand moving quickly down to his side where his own sabre should have been. All he felt there was empty space – where had he lost his own weapon? He couldn't remember.

But there was no time to think about that now. Draven had already drawn his own light-sabre, its blue flame helping to partially illuminate the figure that had been stalking them. Jad saw a familiar figure, but with eyes aflame and drenched in the blood of his enemies.

"Master Bora?" Jad said, in shock.


	12. Chapter 11

**Chapter 11**

Deep in space, many light years away, the _Raven_ shook violently, rocked by weapons fire from the ships pursuing it. The ships had appeared out of nowhere, almost as soon as they had left the unnamed planet behind. There was no warning, no demands or threats… they had simply opened fire.

"Dammit!" Garr screamed from the cockpit as the _Raven_ shook again. "How the hell are they tracking us? Is our stealth drive even working?"

A console at the side of the cockpit exploded, sending sparks and searing hot metal flying across the room. Wordlessly, Batalla rushed over and tried to douse the flames which had erupted. Elle, eyes wide in fright, unbuckled her harness and dived forward next to Garr, struggling to keep her balance.

"Why aren't we jumping to light speed?" she screamed in his ear.

Garr recoiled as though she had struck him. "Damn, girl", he yelled back. "Do you have to scream so loud? The drive's shot. It was the first thing they hit after they jumped in. We've got no way out".

Batalla had managed to get the fires under control. She approached the view screen, gazing out into the space in front of them. One of the enemy ships passed over them. The three of them watched as it arced slowly around in front of them, turning to face them.

"Shit!" Garr screamed as the enemy ship headed directly at them. "Brace yourselves!"

The ship opened fire at point blank range, tearing a hole through the side of the _Raven_. The ship shook, sending Elle flying across the cockpit. Her head struck the hard metal wall, and blood began to pour. Marc, who until then had stayed still and silent, rose slowly from his seat and moved to help her. He knelt beside her and stroked her cheek gently.

"Hey", he said softly, turning her head so that she faced him. "You OK?" Her eyes were open, and she seemed fine. She moaned in pain but nodded, and Marc helped her back to her feet and over to the chair in which he had been sitting.

"The engines are dying!" Garr screamed, close to hysterics. "Someone get in the god damn weapon pods!"

Batalla, who was still stood beside Garr staring out of the front view screen, rested her hand on his shoulder, getting his attention. She motioned toward something in the corner of the screen, and nodded at him.

A look of realisation passed over Garr's face, and he grinned. "You're one crazy bitch", he said. "I love it! Keep them off us, baby".

As Batalla headed for one of the weapon pods, Garr spun around to face Marc and Elle.

"Okay", he sighed. "We've got no chance of fighting these fuckers off, and our engines are too fried to outrun them. So… we're gonna hide". He spun back around to face the view screen and pointed off to a distant cluster of rocks. "We're gonna hide in _that_ asteroid field. If we go in there then we'll probably never come out. Not in one piece, anyway. It's our only chance, though. If we're going to make it through there unscathed, I'll need someone up front with me seeing the things that I don't. Elle… how's your head?"

Elle shook her head gently. "My vision's blurred", she said, struggling to focus. "I can see, but not well".

"Right". Garr looked at Marc. "Marc, that makes you my co-pilot. Elle, get yourself down to the other weapon pod and start firing. Maybe you'll get lucky".

Elle rose slowly to her feet, still struggling after the blow to the head that she had suffered just before. Marc watched her as she made her way unsteadily out of the cockpit and down towards the weapon pods. When she was out of sight, he turned and sat in the cold metal co-pilots seat, and stared into the black space outside.

Awkward silence fell over the cockpit then, broken only by the sound of weapons hitting the outside of the hull. Garr felt… _uncomfortable _around Marc. He was different now… they'd all sensed it. Since the _Raven_ had picked Marc and an unconscious Elle from the surface of that barren planet, Marc had been distant and preoccupied. Garr tried to focus on manoeuvring the _Raven _toward the asteroid field, but he couldn't help glancing sideways, as though he was frightened that Marc would pounce.

But he didn't. He didn't blink, or move other than the steady rise and fall of his chest as he breathed.

Suddenly, Marc's voice cut through the silence. "They can sense it", he mumbled. "It's all they are now. _Craving. _They want its power. _That's_ how they can follow us. It's like a beacon to them. They're like moths to a flame".

_It… _Garr thought. He knew what Marc was talking about… how could he not? The _orb_ that they'd brought with them. The thing that had caused all of this, that everyone seemed to want.

"And…" Garr hesitated. "And who are _they_?"

Marc turned slowly. Although they were facing each other, Garr got the impression that Marc wasn't really looking at him. It was as though he weren't even there, as though Marc's mind was somewhere else entirely.

"They used to be Jedi", he sighed. "Full of pomp and arrogance. They thought they were invincible, and that nothing could sway them. Now they're something else. Their minds are broken. Now all they feel is the craving…"

"And they can sense it through our stealth drives…" It wasn't really a question which had come through Garr's lips. He knew that it was true – there was no other explanation for how they were tracking them. And it meant that no matter what they did or where they went, there was no way that they could hide.

Unless…

"It's too powerful to destroy, and too dangerous to give up", Marc said, cutting through Garr's thoughts and seemingly reading his mind. "We can't get rid of it. It's our burden now".

_Shit_, Garr thought. So their survival came down to whether Elle and Batalla could fight off their attackers. Judging by the way they were doing now, they didn't stand much chance. The Jedi fighters were too fast and too nimble to get a weapons lock. The only reason they were still alive was because the Jedi – or whatever they were now, seemed reluctant to risk destroying the Raven while the orb was on board.

And the asteroid field wasn't providing as much cover as he'd hoped. He never thought he would be sitting in a cockpit, disappointed to find himself in an asteroid field which was too sparse. Garr began to swerve the Raven towards the larger asteroids, hoping that the ships following them would make a mistake and collide with them. But it wasn't working.

"Fuck this", Garr growled. He swerved around in his seat, taking his eyes off the view screen. "Baby, there's nothing I can do from up here. It's down to you".

Batalla heard Garr's words, but she was much too busy to answer them. Since she had climbed into the weapons pod, she had landed one single shot on their attackers, and it had only caused superficial damage. They were too fast, shooting from one side to the other quicker than she could react to them. There were only two ships, and they were damn near impossible to hit.

She glanced backwards over her shoulder, and looked down across the ship to the other weapons pod, which Elle was using. At first it looked as though she was doing the same thing as Batalla – simply firing randomly in the vain hope that a stray energy blast would connect with one of their attackers. But then Batalla caught sight of Elle's face, and the determined look of absolute concentration that it wore. Elle wasn't simply firing randomly; she was picking her shots carefully.

And her determination soon reaped rewards. One of Elle's shots hit an attacking Jedi fighter dead on, and caused it to spin wildly out of control. Fire burst out of its rear side, and it spun off across the top of the Raven and away into space. Batalla watched it go briefly, before locking her weapon onto the ship and firing repeatedly. Her shots struck the Jedi ship repeatedly, knocking it back again and again. After no more the four or five blasts, the ship burst into a blinding explosion which momentarily blinded Batalla. When her vision cleared, all that was left were shards of the ship's hull.

She clenched her fist in celebration. She turned back around, hoping to see Elle celebrating in the same way. But she wasn't. Elle still wore the same expression, and was trying desperately to hit the second ship. Batalla knew that she shouldn't have stopped firing, and that, incredibly, Elle was coping with the stresses of this situation better than she was.

And it didn't come as a surprise to her when Elle was the one who landed a critical shot on the second ship. This time, Elle allowed herself a moment of celebration, clenching her fist and roaring in triumph.

But it proved premature. Unlike the first ship, this one didn't spin away from the Raven. It spun directly towards it. Batalla saw it first, but the ship came at them too fast for her to warn Garr. There was a deafening crash, and the Raven shook violently to the side. The hull was fractured, and air began to vent out into space.

"Fuck!" Garr screamed from the cockpit. "What the hell was that?"

Batalla ignored Garr's cries for the moment – she trusted that he would find a way to keep the ship stable. She was much more worried about the fracture in the hull, and their rapidly decreasing supply of oxygen. She dragged herself out of the weapons pod as quickly as she could and dived into one of the nearby compartments. There was a toolbox sat on one of the consoles, and she grabbed it and headed towards the fracture.

Elle had climbed down to where she was, and she watched Batalla work with a nervous expression on her face. "Can I do anything?" she asked.

Batalla glanced at her and shook her head quickly. This would be easier if there was no one to get in her way. She took out a laser torch, and started to weld the hull back together. There were pieces of metal scattered across the floor around her – some of it had been knocked from the hull in the collision, other pieced were scrap that had been left around. She used some of the larger pieces to make a makeshift plug to cover the tiny gap which had been opened.

After a few minutes, she stood back from the hull and looked over her work. Batalla knew that it would not be enough to completely stop the leak, but it would at least give them another couple of hours.

Elle was still stood behind her, wearing the same frightened look. Batalla wondered briefly what had happened to the Elle that she had seen sitting opposite her in the weapons pod, the Elle who hadn't flinched in the face of two attacking ships. Gone, it seemed, as though she had never been there to begin with.

In the cockpit, Garr struggled with the controls of the Raven. The collision hadn't just caused a fracture in the hull; it had taken out one of their engines as well.

The ship drifted through the asteroid field. With one of its engines destroyed, Garr struggled to keep the ship out of the path of the giant rocks which surrounded them. His three passengers could do nothing more than sit and watch him struggle.

They had gathered in the cockpit, which was now only illuminated by the red emergency lights. Batalla had patched up the ship, at least so that the major systems were ticking over. But they all knew that without their engines they wouldn't be able to reach the nearest planet with a breathable atmosphere.

"Um…" Elle's nervous voice said, cutting through the wall of silence that had built up. "How long will our oxygen last?"

Garr and Batalla exchanged nervous glances, which were enough to make Elle even more nervous. Garr turned to her and forced a smile. "Not long", he sighed. "We don't have enough to make it to a planet. Unless one or two of us holds our breath for a few hours".

Elle's eyes widened, and she leaned forward in her chair. "But… how do ships normally have enough oxygen?" she asked. "We've been on this ship for days before, and I've never seen you stop to fill up the tanks with air".

Garr waved his hand dismissively. "All ships have an oxygen generation system", he answered. "It takes in the carbon dioxide that we breathe out, filters it, and sends the excess out into space".

"You mean, like photosynthesis?" Elle asked, please that she had heard something that she thought she understood. "Plants do the same – absorb Carbon Dioxide and expel Oxygen"

Garr nodded, with a faint smile that, at least, didn't look forced. "Yeah", he said. "Like plants. Anyway, the process isn't perfect. We end up with slightly less oxygen being returned into the air supply than we breathe in. The difference is usually too small to be noticed – when the ship docks with another, or lands on a planet with a breathable atmosphere – the tanks automatically fill themselves up.

"But now our air supply is pretty much down to zero. The air that we're breathing in is air that has been recycled from what we breathed out maybe ten minutes ago. And the levels of oxygen are dipping. It'll run out in maybe two hours, or less if we keep talking like this. We can use the space suits, which have another three hours air supply, but…"

"But what?" Elle prompted.

Garr looked guilty. "But…" he continued. "We only have two of those".

Elle took a deep breath, giving herself time for this information to sink in. "So", Elle said after a moment. "What are we going to do?"

Silence fell again, as they thought about their situation. Garr wouldn't admit it, even to Batalla, but he had no idea how they were going to get out of this situation.

But then Marc, who until then had been sitting in complete silence, spoke. His voice was still distant, as though he were only half interested in what was going on around him, but the others hung on his words.

"Did anyone see what happened to the Jedi ship?" he breathed. "The one that hit us?" None of the others answered – it was clear that they hadn't.

"I did", Marc continued with a smile. "It didn't explode like the other one. It went down on one of the large asteroids. I bet it's still mostly intact".

There was a long silence, while the others simply stared at Marc. After a while, Gar broke this silence.

"Fuck yeah", he said, simply.


	13. Chapter 12

**Chapter 12**

The Raven approached the site where the Jedi ship had gone down like a wounded animal, limping. Where before it had travelled across the Galaxy as gracefully as an eagle, now it had to drag itself along with its one good engine.

"OK", Garr said, trying to hide how nervous he was. "This won't be a pretty landing".

And he was right. The Raven hovered perhaps a hundred yards above the surface for a while, struggling to fight the gravity from the asteroid. When Garr had worked up the courage to make an attempt at landing, he tried to lower the Raven slowly. Suddenly, the ship plummeted sixty yards towards the hard rock beneath them, before Garr could compensate.

"Shit!" he shouted, when he'd wrestled the ship back under control. "This is harder than I thought. Something's seriously shitting up the Raven. Elle, see if you can make any sense out of the scanners".

Marc watched as Elle rushed to the front of the cockpit. _No hesitation… _he mused. _She's different. Even though it's been barely a week, she's grown up. _A smile spread across his face, and he leant his head back against his seat and closed his eyes.

"Anything?" Garr shouted towards Elle.

Elle's face was contorted in a frown, as though she were struggling to understand something. "I don't get it", she said. "There's a massive gravitational field. It's pulling us down harder than the starboard engine can compensate for on its own".

Garr swore under his breath. He knew that the best he could do was to hope that he could slow their descent enough so that the ship didn't break apart on impact. What was this asteroid made out of? It must have been something incredibly dense to generate a gravitational field like this one. Whatever it was, it was clear that they wouldn't be able to escape the asteroid unless they could repair their engine along with their oxygen filter.

This just gets better and better, Garr though bitterly.

Suddenly, a loud groaning sound filled the cockpit. It sounded like metal being bent into the wrong position. Batalla stood and shot back out of the cockpit, towards the point at which the hull had breached during the battle with the Jedi ships. She had known just from the sound what was happening. The hull was bending under the force of the gravity. Her patch job repair was now by far the weakest part of the ship, and it would be the first place to buckle.

But it proved to be of no consequence. Seconds later, the Raven impacted with the surface of the asteroid.

* * *

"_I don't know what this feeling is. It's not guilt, exactly…" Marc sat at the bar, surrounded by the dregs who always seemed to gravitate here on a Friday night. _Rosie's, _the place was called. The guy who owned it was at least 300 pounds, and the stubble that covered his face made Marc pretty sure that he wasn't called Rosie. "Maybe it's doubt"._

_Marc's older brother sat beside him, nursing a half empty glass of the piss that they tried to pass of as beer in this place. He didn't answer. He just lifted his glass and swirled it around, staring down at its contents. Marc watched him, not sure whether he was going to get a response or not. His brother lifted his glass to his lips and took a long swig, emptying it, before slamming it back down on the bar._

_Then he pushed himself away and got up to leave._

_Marc glanced up at the TV that hung above the bar. The football wasn't going well. His team were dead on their feet, and they were way behind. He sighed and turned to follow his brother._

"_Jay", he said, chasing him out into the street. The street lights lit up the deserted road. Cars littered the sides – they passed one which had been broken into, and Marc winced as he crushed some of the broken glass under his shoes. He could hear sirens in the distance – it was a familiar sound. This neighbourhood was falling apart… they could see the difference each and every day._

_Marc caught up with his brother and fell into step with him. "Jay", he said. "What're we doing? Where are we going?"_

_His brother glanced sideways at him, irritably. "I was trying to get away from your bitching", he growled. "Oooh, I don't _know _what this _feeling is" _he said, mimicking Marc. "You sound like a homo."_

_Marc punched his brother on the arm, but he was smiling. His brother wasn't one for showing his own feelings. Marc should have known he wouldn't be interested in his. _

"_Anyway", Jay said. "It doesn't matter what you're thinking. We've got important shit to do". He stopped, and walked out into the middle of the road. He spread his hands out and into the air, and looked up at the sky above him. "'This place is falling to pieces', you thought. And you're right. You're the only person who can fix it, and you know it. You shouldn't feel guilty for choosing your destiny over your squeeze. In fact, I'm surprised you've dragged her along with you this far. She's dead weight"._

_Marc had been watching his brother in the street, but now he turned away. "I dunno", he sighed. "She's grown up. She seems to understand the way things work. She might surprise you. I'm hoping I can get her on board with what we're doing"._

_Jay looked at his brother with a smile on his face, and then he snorted laughter. "You're deluding yourself, kid," he said._

_Marc looked down at his feet for a moment, before turning and joining his brother in the middle of the road. "Maybe you're right", he said. "I guess I'll find out soon enough"._

_There was a sudden loud noise coming from behind them. Marc turned in surprise, and came face to face with an old green car. Its driver was clearly an angry man – his hand was planted on his car horn, and his other hand was waving around frantically. They couldn't hear what he was saying, but they were pretty sure it wasn't friendly. The two boys looked at each other, and then they burst into laughter._

_They slowly moved to the side of the road, and watched the green car drive off until they couldn't see it anymore._

"_So", Marc said after a while. "I'm starved. Where to now?"_

_Jay thought about it in silence for a moment. Then he looked up at Marc. "KFC", he said with a grin._

* * *

Words drifted through Elle's mind. She recognised the voices, but she couldn't tell which words were real and which words only existed inside her mind.

"…never make it off this rock…"

Her body felt… _heavy_. And her head was pounding. She tried to open her eyes, but they wouldn't move no matter how hard she tried.

"…guess it's time for my sob story…"

All she could see was the darkness, and was started to get scared. Were the others alright? She could vaguely remember that they were in trouble. What were they doing? There was a battle, right? And she had… helped.

"…shit, the hull's breached. Get in the…"

That couldn't be right. How could she have helped anyone? She was useless, wasn't she? She couldn't stop Sar from dying, or Garin. Or the people in her village. Everyone around her seemed to suffer.

"…Elle. It's time to wake up."

Suddenly, the weight that was forcing her eyelids closed lifted, and she slowly opened her eyes. She looked up into the smiling face of Marc, and suddenly everything seemed alright. She tried to sit up, but found that her body seemed to weigh three times what it normally did. She grunted with the effort, and Marc placed a hand gently on her shoulder.

"Don't", he said softly. "The gravity here's much stronger than we're used to. Best just to stay where you are".

Elle let herself fall back to the ground. Even just lying there was painful – like someone had put a huge weight on top of her. She stared up at Marc, who was sitting upright. "What's happening?" she asked. "Are the others…"

"They're alright", Marc answered. "We crashed into this rock, and the hull breached again. We had to act pretty quickly – they're pretty good under pressure. They took the two space suits and sealed us in the cockpit, to cut us off from the breach. They've headed out to the downed Jedi ship to see if they can salvage anything".

Elle was relieved – at least they were doing something. It was strange… before she would have been terrified by this situation. They were stranded on a lifeless rock, with no air and no engines to get them away from here. But she wasn't terrified. She was scared – there was a horrible feeling in her stomach that kept getting worse – but she was _calm_ and composed. Her mind was already looking for ways that she could help.

She reached her hand up and grabbed onto Marc's shoulder, and used him to drag herself into a sitting position. As she looked around she started to realise just how bad the impact had been. There didn't seem to be a single console still intact. Panels were strewn across the floor, and exposed wires were sending sparks shooting around the room.

Elle sighed. "OK", she said. Then she shoved herself against the nearest wall and pushed herself to her feet. Marc watched her, with a crooked smile across his lips, but he didn't make any move to follow.

Elle staggered across to the main navigation console, at which Garr had sat pretty much constantly since rescuing her and Marc. The panels were broken, and it looked to her untrained eye like some of the wiring had come undone.

She turned back to Marc. "We're going to fix the console", she said. Marc just continued to stare at her and smile, but he noticed the determination that had filled her voice. "It'll be no good if they get back with the right parts for the engine and the oxygen filter, but we still can't take off because the buttons don't work".

"Neither of us know anything about repairing space ships", Marc pointed out.

Elle bent down and picked up one of the broken pieces of the console. "Then it's the ideal time for us to learn", she said with a smile.


	14. Chapter 13

**Chapter 13**

Outside, in the coldness of space, two figures stood beside the fallen Jedi ship. When it had been built, it was the peak of design and technology. In fact, this class of ship was a direct ancestor of the Raven – it had a massive wingspan, though one had broken off in the crash, with a long, thin front end. They were lucky – it looked as though there was minimal damage. The ship must have come down at a shallow angle. Behind them there was a long indent in the rock where it had slid along the surface of the asteroid.

Garr was working at opening one of the rear side air-locks. The gloves of his suit made the job much more difficult, as did the intense gravity that he was fighting against. It took too long – they both knew that they were short on time. They couldn't say for sure, but they had guessed that the air in the Raven would last less than an hour, and the air in their own suits would be gone perhaps an hour after that. They needed to work a lot faster than they were.

Finally, the air-lock door released. They couldn't hear it, but they could see the air flow out of the narrow gap that had appeared in the door as the room beyond depressurised. Garr held out his hand and Batalla used it to pull herself up from the sitting position that she had been in. They both took hold of the door and worked together to slowly pull it open.

Inside, there was no light other than the light of the computer consoles. Garr approached one of them as Batalla pulled the door closed behind them. He was silently praying that the air-lock controls were still functional, and that the ship's hull integrity had been maintained despite the crash. He flicked one of the switches, and an image appeared on the monitor above the console. Garr turned to Batalla, who had moved behind him and was observing his progress. He smiled, though she couldn't see his face through his helmet, and gave her a thumbs up – the controls seemed to be working.

It took a few moments for him to familiarise himself with the controls. Suddenly, they were greeted by the reassuring sound of air filling the room. A display on the monitor showed the progress of the repressurisation. After a minute or so, when the room was repressurised, the monitor blinked green.

Although everything seemed to be fully functional, they both still hesitated. They knew that the room had been filled with gas, but for all they knew it could have been pure Carbon Dioxide rather than Oxygen. The pair stood still for a moment, looking at each other. Batalla could sense Garr's trepidation, but they both knew that if they couldn't even make it past the airlock then they would never get off this rock. She decided that she would take a leap of faith.

As she moved to remove her helmet, Garr moved his hands upward as though he were going to stop her, but chose not to. She struggled to remove her heavy helmet, and, as Garr heard the _click_ that indicated that the helmet had been released, he held his breath. Visions of Batalla suffocating, and thrashing around on the floor in agony flashed through his mind.

Instead, the nervous look on her face turned to a smile. The air in the crashed ship seemed fine.

Garr removed his own helmet and moved to help Batalla, who was struggling to push open the air lock's inner door. As it slowly swung open, the lights in the corridor beyond flickered into life. They cast an eerie glow across the inside of the ship. The crash had caused damage, but not a lot of it – there were occasional rips in the walls, or consoles which had overloaded. But the structure of the ship seemed to be undamaged.

All of which worried Garr. If the landing had been so smooth, then the Jedi – or whatever they were now – could have easily survived. So where were they? There must have been three or four, assuming they had all survived the chaos that must have overtook them when the wave from the orb hit them.

Still, they couldn't afford to waste any time.

"B", he said to his companion. "We're behind schedule. You see if you can salvage the oxygen filtration unit, and I'll take care of the engine parts. And let's hope to god that we can carry the stuff back to the Raven in this gravity".

* * *

"Um… where does this go, do you think?"

Progress in the cockpit of the Raven had been slow for a while, but it had ground to a halt in the last few minutes. Marc had spent most of the time watching Elle work. He found himself enjoying seeing her so determined – the scrunched up look on her face was cute, and she had been concentrating so hard that she hadn't noticed that her hair had come free and now hung down to her shoulders.

And Marc had been surprised at just how quickly Elle had figured out the mechanics of the Raven. Back on Socorro she had filled her days with school and her art. She'd been totally incapable of holding down any kind of job – she'd tried working in market stalls, in the orphanage. She even tried working in a ranch. Not Marc's family ranch – a smaller, rival one close by. She'd told Marc that she'd left because the work hadn't stimulated her mind enough. Marc had always figured she was hiding the fact that she couldn't cope with the manual labour, but looking at her working on the Raven made him think that maybe there was something special going on in her head.

That is, until now.

"Uh…" Marc said. "I _think _that's the door handle".

Elle carried on looking at it with a frown. After a few moments of silence, she spoke. "Oh", she said. She turned her head to the door – specifically at the place where the handle should have been. "Well we'd best put it back, don't you think?"

Marc smiled, and his eyes followed her as she strode across the room to the door. He couldn't help but notice the limp. It brought his mind back to what happened at the temple. He still couldn't remember everything that had happened, but even when he was completely out of it Elle's screams still managed to fill his head. Jani, the Grey Jedi who had led them on, promising to help them save their friend, had betrayed them. All she had wanted was the Orb – the same object that now sat in the cargo hold of the Raven, and the object that now called out to every person who was sensitive to the Force in the Galaxy.

Jani had turned on them when they had finally reached their goal. Their friend was long dead, killed by Jani's former lover who was, in turn, killed by her. And when Jani feared that she might not get what she had fought and killed for, she had taken her anger out on Elle. Many of her bones had been snapped, and though the medical bay on the Raven had been able to mostly heal those wounds, it looked as though she was still feeling the pain.

"Sit down", Marc said softly. "Take a rest".

Elle didn't even look around when she answered. "Marc", she said sternly. "We're trapped on an asteroid… we're quickly running out of air, and our engines are broken. Now isn't the time to sit on our asses and do nothing".

Marc looked at the back of her head, and he sighed. "And you think that fixing the door handle is going to help us survive this?" he asked. She turned and gave him an angry look – it seemed he had struck a nerve. "Listen", he said, his voice soft again to try and soothe her irritation. "I know you want to help – hell, you've managed to fix the flight console by yourself. You've done all you can. It's down to the others to bring back the equipment we need now".

Elle sighed, and then she trudged over to where Marc was sitting and collapsed beside him. Marc didn't say anything, but her weight in the increased gravity almost crushed him when she landed. It took all his willpower not to cry out.

Instead, he wrapped his arm around her shoulders and gently pushed her head onto his chest. "We'll be fine", he said. "Trust me".

"I know", Elle said. Her voice had become small again – it seemed as though the determination that had filled her up until then had drained away. She was backed to being frightened. "I think… if I stop doing things then all I can do is sit and worry about everything, you know? And I hate that. Even after all we've gone through, I still get terrified over everything".

"Yeah, me too". Elle looked up into Marc's eyes, and he smiled down at her. "I think that's a good thing. Shows we're still real". He leaned forward and kissed her gently on the forehead, before closing his eyes and leaning it back against the wall. "So… how do you think they're doing?"

* * *

"God damned piece of crap!"

After separating from Batalla, Garr had moved straight down to the engine bay. When he'd arrived, he saw that the engine was mostly intact, which was good news. The bad news was that the engine in this Jedi ship was different to the broken engine in the Raven. He knew that this would make it more difficult to integrate these systems into the Raven – and, worse, it would take more time. But it wasn't impossible.

He had crawled into the maintenance tubes behind the engine, which was the place where all of the connections to the other systems were. If he could disconnect the cables that connected the engine to the rest of the ship, then he was pretty sure he could modify them to fit with the Raven. But it was proving a hell of a lot more difficult that he thought, especially with the added problem of everything weighing five times as much as it should.

He'd spent the last ten minutes trying to gently unscrew the cables to avoid any chance of damaging them. But it hadn't worked, and his frustration had grown and grown. He had resorted to hitting the connection with anything he could find – his tools, the debris, his foot – in the hopes of dislodging it. And it was working – the wires were slowly becoming looser and looser, until finally they dropped to the floor with a loud clang.

Garr quickly grabbed them and dragged them back out of the maintenance tube and back to where the main part of the engine was held. It was about ten feet high, and just as wide. The outer casing had started out with a metallic sheen, but through the years it had been in service it had become covered in black grime. Because these engines were so reliable they were often poorly maintained, so if they ever did break down it would be even more difficult to repair them.

There was no chance of Garr being able to drag the entire unit out with him, but thankfully he only needed certain sections of it. He took out a screwdriver and began to unscrew one of the panels.

Suddenly, a loud bang reverberated through the engine room. Garr spun around, and he raised the screwdriver up as though it were a weapon.

He took a few nervous steps forward. "B?" he called out. There was no answer. He waited a few more moments, but there was no more sound. He decided that it must have just been some loose equipment that had fallen to the ground, and he turned back to his work.

Suddenly, he felt cold hands grab at his face from behind him, and he felt a sharp pain in his neck, as though someone had stabbed him. He cried out in pain, and forced his head around so that he could catch a glimpse of his attacker. He couldn't get a clear view, but what he did see was the side of someone – or some_things_ head. Its hair was stained with blood, and he knew what it was. It was one of the Jedi who had piloted this ship. And he realised that he hadn't been stabbed at all. His attacker had sunk his teeth into Garr's neck.

Garr raised his hands and tried to push his attacker away from him, but its grip on his neck would not release. His mind was starting to shut down with the panic – there was no one here to help him, and he knew that there was no chance of him being able to overpower a Jedi.

And then his attacker started to pull away from him, without releasing its grip on his neck. Garr screamed as he felt a chunk of his neck tear away from his body, and as he felt the pain shoot through his body. He fell to his knees.

Through the pain, he forced his eyes upwards. What he saw sent chills straight to his soul. This… _things_ face was mutilated with scars, with dried blood covering almost all of its skin. Its eyes were wild, and crazed. Their eyes met, and in that moment Garr knew that he was going to die.

Suddenly, the creature's chest exploded, sending blood and guts shooting out, drenching Garr. He cried out again, and quickly moved his hand to his eyes to wipe away the blood which had covered them.

When his eyes were clear enough for him to see again, he turned around slowly. Behind him, Batalla stood, blaster rifle in hand. She had saved him.

* * *

Back at the Raven, Marc and Elle were slumped on the floor. Elle had her head on Marc's chest, and his arm was draped over her. They were both exhausted.

The Raven's cockpit was as ready as they could make it. Elle had done her best to repair the consoles, and she was fairly happy with the way they had turned out. The key systems had mostly survived the crash, and Elle had spent her time repairing the few that hadn't.

For his part, Marc had spent most of his time clearing out the cockpit and making sure that when the engines were working again this room was actually capable of keeping the four of them comfortable. The floor had been cleared of all the clutter, and the seats had been fixed back into position. It was starting to look like it had done before the crash.

They were pleased with the progress that they'd made, but there was something that had been hanging over their heads.

"How long?" Elle asked without lifting her head. Marc turned to look down at her, but he didn't answer. Elle lifted her head and looked him dead in the eye. "How long?" she repeated more sternly.

Marc sighed, heavily. "Twenty minutes until the filters cut out", he said. "I guess we'd last another ten or so after that. But it won't get that far. They'll be back soon".

Elle's face contorted into a doubtful expression. "Yeah..." she sighed. Then she lowered her head again and rested it back on Marc's chest. Marc began to gently stroke her hair while he thought.

Marc was more worried about what would happen if they _did _come back. With the tiny amount of oxygen left in the tanks, even if they were replaced that moment it would still only buy them another couple of hours. He had no idea how far the nearest habitable planet or space station was. He hated the thought of giving Elle false hope only to find out that they'd only delayed their deaths for a while.

Then they head a loud bang coming from beyond the door. Elle jumped up and backed away. Marc followed her, a little more cautiously, and positioned himself between her and the door. He knew that it had to be Garr and Batalla. There was no one else alive on this rock... was there?

Another loud bang, and the door crept open just a few centimetres. There was a makeshift airlock just beyond, which was used to cushion the cockpit from the vacuum outside. Someone had obviously re-pressurised it.

Another bang, and the door crept open a little more. Marc tensed, trying to get himself ready for anything that could come through. He knelt down quickly and grabbed a spanner from the floor beside his feet. It wasn't much of a weapon, but it was better than nothing.

Then they heard a voice calling through the gap, and relief washed over them both.

"Hey, assholes", Garr's voice yelled. "You gonna help with this door or what?"

Elle jumped with joy, a wide smile spreading across her face. "It's Garr!" she screamed, before she rushed forward and started to pull at the door. Marc followed, slower but no less relieved. Together they managed to prise the door open enough for Garr to squeeze through. He was still in his space suit at this point, but once he was inside the cockpit he began to slowly remove it, discarding the pieces on the floor.

Elle looked around outside the cockpit, but couldn't see anyone else there. "Um..." she mumbled. "Where's Batalla?"

Garr looked at her and grinned. "Batalla", he said, "is fitting the shiny new parts for our engine. We've just finished fitting the Oxygen filter. I just need to activate it from here".

"How much time has it bought us?" Marc asked. He wore a frown on his face, and Garr realised that he knew that they were in more shit than he'd let on.

There was a long pause before Garr answered. "Less than three hours", he replied. "If we can't reach a breathable atmosphere to replenish our oxygen tanks before then we'll suffocate".

The three of them looked at the floor in silence.

"Still", Garr said with a smile. "At least it's better than nothing". Then he walked swiftly over to the front console and pressed a few switches.

They all felt the fresh oxygen wash over them. Elle closed her eyes and savoured it, but Marc's mind was more focussed on their fate.

"Is there any place we can reach before the air runs out?" he asked.

Garr didn't even look round. Instead, he continued to stare at the front console. He looked confused.

"Wait..." he said. "Wasn't this console broken when we left? Did you fix this?"

He looked up, and Marc nodded. "Elle did", he sighed.

Garr looked across at her, and she looked down, embarrassed. "Well", he said. "I'll be damned. I doubt I could've figured this shit out as quick as you. There's hope for you yet".

Marc was growing more impatient. "Garr", he said sternly. "Answer my question. Is there anywhere we can reach before we all suffocate?"

Garr met his gaze. "With out old engines..." he replied. "No, there isn't. But these new parts B's fitting now should improve the performance. If we're lucky, they'll make us quick enough to reach somewhere in time".

Marc wasn't convinced, but he stayed silent.

They heard rustling behind them, and Batalla appeared through the door. Once she had secured the door, she removed her helmet and nodded at Garr.

"Right", he said, sliding into the pilot's seat. "Looks like we're ready. Hold on to your asses".

The engines stuttered into life as Marc, Elle and Batalla secured themselves in their seats. The Raven lifted slowly and painfully into the air – there were squeals coming from seemingly every part of the ship, but at least it was flying again.

"Success!" Garr yelled, punching the air. "Are we good or what?"

Even though he was still worried, Marc couldn't keep the smile from spreading across his lips.

The Raven rose higher and higher into the air, and then, in a single burst of speed, it shot off into the depths of space.


	15. Chapter 14

**Chapter 14**

_Warning, Oxygen levels dangerously low. Warning, Oxygen levels dangerously low._

The monotone, computerised voice filled the escape pod. It was the only sound, save for the steady breathing of Lieutenant Anna Kendall. She lay back in the single chair at the centre of the pods living area, as she had done for the past three days. The _Endor_ was long gone – millions of miles behind them, in pieces on the surface of a forgotten planet. For three days she had waited alone inside the pod.

_God... _she thought. _It's so hot in here._

The air seemed to be growing thicker and heavier, and the rapidly diminishing oxygen supply was pushing Kendall to the brink of delirium.

_Warning. Oxygen levels dangerously low. Ten minutes supply remaining. Enter a breathable atmosphere to replenish supplies._

Kendall's let her head fall to the side, and her eyes opened slowly. She looked over at the speaker next to her. _I really need to turn that thing off... _she thought. Her hand made a vain attempt at reaching out, and she pawed at the speaker pathetically.

A voice at the back of her head screamed at her. It told her to shake herself out of it, to find out what happened to the other pod. She had lost contact with them a day and a half ago. With four people crammed into one escape pod, the chances were that the oxygen had already run out, and that they had all died...

Kendall forced herself to sit upright. The consoles in front of her were covered with flashing red lights, and for a moment she struggled to find what she was looking for. The pod's sensors were still feeding her information, and from the readout she could see that the other pod was still floating alongside her, a couple of miles to starboard.

She opened communications with them. "H..." she tried to speak, but her throat was too dry for the words to form. She swallowed and tried again. "Harper... come in Harper..."

There was no response.

"Anyone..." she mumbled. Her head was becoming lighter and lighter every second, and she knew that it wouldn't be long before the lack of oxygen forced her unconscious.

She stared at the communicator for another few moments, but all that she got from it was silence. There was no one left on the other shuttle. She was all alone, in the middle of space, and she was going to die...

Kendall fell backwards in her chair. _I should have stayed on the _Endor_, _she thought bitterly. _At least then it would have been quick._

A noise suddenly cut through the darkness. A beeping sound – high pitched and deafeningly loud. At first Kendall thought it might be a voice coming over the communicator, and that in her delirious state she just couldn't understand it. But then she realised that the sound was coming from a different place to her left. She wearily glanced over at the control panel which was emitting the sound.

The readings were... confusing. Collision imminent, the readout was telling her. But that was impossible. She had just looked at the sensor readout and there was nothing in range except for the other pod, which was still floating miles away from her.

_Crap_, she thought. _Now on top of everything, the damn pod's malfunctioning. I guess it won't matter for long._

Kendall suddenly felt herself relaxed, felt the tension flow out of her body. This was good. This was right. She wouldn't have to worry much longer. Soon she could rest. Soon, that's all she would do.

Her brow furrowed as yet another noise reverberated around the tiny pod. This time, it was the same computerised voice which had reminded her again and again that the oxygen was running out. But now it told her something different.

_Warning, _it said. _Pod is caught in gravitational field and is accelerating. If you do not engage reverse thrusters then we will continue to accelerate, and collide with the approaching object._

Kendall sat up again and checked the sensors. There was still nothing there other than herself and the other pod. So what was the stupid computer talking about? She dragged herself to her feet and across to the solitary window in the pod.

When she looked out, what breath was left inside her escaped. Her view was filled by... green land and blue sea. A planet. A massive planet. And she was so close to it that she couldn't see its outline.

The pod was accelerating. She was travelling almost a thousand miles per hour. The computer was right. If the reverse thrusters weren't switched on now, then the pod would either collide with the planet's surface or burn up in its atmosphere. But... neither of those things would be worse that suffocating slowly in this pod.

Kendall found herself filled with a new found energy. Here was a chance of survival. A slim chance, she knew, but it was still a chance. She accessed the engine controls and activated the reverse thrusters. Even with the compensator engaged she could still felt the sudden decrease in their acceleration.

But that wasn't all she needed, Kendall knew. They were approaching at the wrong angle. If its atmosphere was breathable, then she knew that at this rate the pod would either bounce off the atmosphere or burn up. She quickly used the terminals to calculate the ideal angle for entry, and set the engines to adjust their trajectory.

The adjustments were completed with barely a second to go – the pod hit the atmosphere and instantly it started to shake violently. Kendall was thrown painfully onto the cold metal floor, but managed to drag herself back into the seat and strap herself in.

She hated escape pods. Their design was... odd. From where she was sitting she couldn't see outside, and she had to rely on sensors and the computer itself to get her down. The problem with that was that the pod's sensors still insisted that there was nothing out there – that the planet didn't exist. Either she was losing her mind, or the planet had somehow been made invisible to sensors.

The pod descended quickly through the planet's atmosphere. The thrusters were slowing it down with each passing moment, but by the time it hit the surface it was still travelling quickly – too quickly. It bounced off the ground several times, crashing through trees and rocks before finally coming to a halt several hundred yards from where it had first made contact with the ground.

Kendall was alive at least. As soon as they'd hit the atmosphere the ship had automatically refilled the oxygen supplies, so at least she knew that the atmosphere was breathable. She tried to unstrap herself from the seat, but when she moved her right arm a sharp pain shot up through her shoulder and into her neck. She glanced down at it and saw that her uniform had become stained with red blood.

With her left hand she slowly and carefully peeled back her right sleeve. It hurt like hell, and she knew that her arm was pretty messed up. But she couldn't help but gasp when she saw just how bad it was – the bone was sticking out through her skin, and it had snapped almost clean in half.

_Shit_, she thought. She hadn't felt it when it happened. Must have been because of the extended lack of oxygen shutting her senses down. But now that she was breathing steadily the pain was slowly increasing moment by moment, becoming nearly unbearable.

Kendall unstrapped herself using her left arm and fell to the floor. There was a first aid kit here somewhere, she knew, and it would have bandages and pain killers. She needed to find it. But the pain was slowly overtaking her – her vision was becoming blurred. She felt like she was going to pass out, and not for the first time that day.

Kendall opened every panel she could reach, but none of them contained a first aid kit. She was becoming more and more panicked as time went on, until, out of the corner of her eye, she spotted something red sticking out from under a destroyed piece of equipment.

Her legs struggled to push her towards it, and her one good hand was barely enough to clear away the metal. But, after struggling for what seemed an age, she found herself staring down at what she had been searching for – the first aid kit.

She cradled it in her arm and forced herself to her feet. Thankfully the escape hatch had been thrown open on impact, so she crawled slowly out into the open air.

A few yards from the smoking pod she collapsed. Her head was spinning from both the pain and the after effects of her prolonged lack of oxygen, and she knew that she wouldn't be able to fix her arm. Through the blur she could see the blood flowing – not just from her arm, but from a wound in her stomach as well.

"_Gggnnll"_

A familiar sound broke through the daze. She knew what it was, but no matter how much she tried she couldn't recognise it.

"_Knnggglll"_

A face appeared in her vision. At least, she thought it was a face – it was looking at her, whatever it was. A familiar face...

"_Kendall!"_

Her face broke into a smile, and she let herself slip into unconsciousness.


	16. Chapter 15

**Chapter 15**

"Where the hell are we?"

Kendall rolled her eyes and sighed. It was eight hours later, and Kendall had woken from her slumber barely fifty minutes ago. Bowes had asked that question nearly a dozen times, and that was only since she had woken up. Her mouth was still too dry for her to speak, even though she had drunk plenty of water.

At least, she thought it was water. The planet that they had crashed on was snow covered, and she had been picking up balls of snow and letting the heat from her hand melt it to water. It wasn't the easiest way to drink, but it was better than nothing.

Her inability to speak was grating. She had a dozen questions that she wanted to ask Bowes that she couldn't. How had he got here? Presumably the same way she had, but where were the other survivors from the Endor? How did they have enough oxygen to make it this far? Kendall had barely had enough in her escape pod, and there was only one of her...

After a while she realised that the answers to those questions weren't important. Not yet, anyway. They were on a planet that they knew nothing about, other than that, as far as the Alliance's navigation computers were concerned, it did not exist. They had followed an empty escape pod across the system, with no clue of its destination, or who had sent it on its way. No... what had happened inside the other escape pod wasn't important. They needed to find their way off this planet.

"Kendall?" Bowes asked, shuffling closer to her as they both shivered in the cold. "What are we going to do?"

Kendall leaned her head back until it was resting on the wall of the cave that they had sought refuge inside, and she closed her eyes. She had never liked Bowes. He was... _ambitious. _Always trying to get ahead, and not caring who he hurt along the way. But she was in a bad way – she was worried that the prolonged lack of oxygen that she had suffered in the pod had severely damaged her organs. She needed help, and fast. Bowes was her only hope.

She swallowed, and made yet another attempt to speak. "I..." she tried, but her throat still burned and she had to pause. "I don't know..." she croaked, slowly. "But we have to move".

Kendall pushed her weak hand against the ground and tried to push her way up the wall to her feet. Bowes watched her silently for a moment, and then reluctantly got up and helped her. Kendall got the impression that, even though he was asking these questions, he didn't really want to know the answers. He wanted to stay hidden in this cave, because he thought it was safe...

Kendall motioned to Bowes that she was OK to walk on her own – although in truth she wasn't sure she was – and she tentatively made her way towards the opening of the cave. The snow seemed to be easing off a little – at least, she could see ten feet in front of her instead of two.

She looked back over her shoulder at Bowes. "Let's go", she said.

Though they both tried to protect their faces as they walked, the cold wind and snow still lapped at their faces. They had been walking for barely a few minutes and the moisture in Kendall's face had already begun to freeze.

_There's nothing here_, Kendall thought. _Nothing at all_. _We've been lured to a planet with nothing but cold and death, and now we're going to slowly freeze to death._

Bowes, mercifully, had been silent since they had left the cave, and Kendall had no interest in striking up a conversation. In fact, if the wind hadn't dropped at just that moment then she wouldn't have heard the thud of a body hitting the floor from behind her, and she would have carried on walking on her own for hours, oblivious.

But as it was, she did hear Bowes hit the ground. As she turned she barely caught sight of the butt of a blaster coming at her head before, once again, the world went dark.

Bad dreams. Recently, all of Kendall's dreams had been _bad dreams. _It had gotten so bad that, for the last few weeks, she had gone to sleep every night frightened of what new horrors would be waiting behind her closed eyes. But as she woke up, and her surroundings began to register, she realised that what was waiting for her in the waking world might be far worse...

She was alone. That was the first thing that she noticed – before the metal bars, before the realisation sunk in that she was trapped in a room with no way out... she noticed that she was alone. And that frightened her.

She had no idea how long she had been out, but her neck was aching like she had never felt before, she she guessed that it had been quite a while. At least she had a little more energy in her arms and legs, and her throat wasn't burning quite so much.

She tentatively made an attempt to get to her feet. Her head started to feel light as she stood, and she reached her hand out and leaned on the wall nearest to her. As she touched it she realised that it wasn't metal, as she had thought at first. It looked black and smooth to her eyes, but her fingers told a different story. The surface was... _warm..._ It felt like skin.

She started to reach her other hand out towards it, fascinated by its touch. Before she could reach it, however, she heard a door open on the other side of her cell door. And then... _footsteps. _She moved closer to the door and strained her ears to listen. Two sets of footsteps... and another sound, like something being dragged along the floor. A cold feeling gripped her stomach.

The slam of heavy locks being opened echoed through her cell, and as Kendall stepped back the door in front of her swung open.

Kendall came face to face with two men, clad in black uniforms, masks covering their faces. Hanging limply between them was the bloodied body of Bowes. He was a real mess. It looked like they'd tortured him, badly. His face was bloodied and swollen – he was barely recognisable.

The two black clad figures threw Bowes into the centre of the cell, and then one of them began to move towards Kendall. She backed away slowly, but after a few steps her back came up against the cell wall. What happened next, she supposed, was just reflex. The man made a sudden movement to grab her, and she took his arm in her hands and twisted around, pulling the man up and over her shoulder, sending him slamming down into the ground.

She felt another hand grab her shoulder. The other man had rushed forward, and was now wrestling her down to the ground. The man that she had floored was already on his feet, and he started to kick her – hard – in the stomach, over and over and over. Just when she thought he wouldn't stop until her insides exploded, he was dragged away from her.

They moved maybe a yard away from her, and whispered to each other. She couldn't hear anything that they said, but they both sounded angry. Kendall tried to move her head to look at them, but pain shot through her with every move she made. She did manage to move enough so that she could see Bowes' face. He wasn't awake, but his eyes were flickering, which meant he was at least alive. For now.

The two men grabbed her shoulders and dragged Kendall to her feet. The pain was still excruciating, and she couldn't stop herself from letting out a moan as she rose. They lifted her so that her feet were just touching the ground, and then they carried her out of the cell. The pain was making her light headed, and she barely registered her surroundings. She thought that she felt... stairs, and a long corridor. The walls around her were the same as the ones in the cells. Black, smooth looking. Her head was starting to clear, but she could swear that the walls were... _moving. _In and out, like the building, or whatever she was inside, was breathing.

They passed through a large door, and emerged into a massive room. There were small terminals lining the walls, and dotted about the middle of the room. Towards that back, which was where her assailants were taking her, was a... a _throne_. There was no other word for it.

And sat on that throne was... a _demon. _At first Kendall assumed that her eyes were playing tricks on her. This... _man_... was huge. Nearly twice as tall as the people around him. And he was covered in some kind of metal frame which ran the length of his body, like some kind of... outward skeleton. Kendall assumed it covered all sides of him, though she couldn't see his back. It was covered by a black cloak, and most of his head was covered by a large hood.

There were about twenty other people in the room, some scurrying around, others sat at terminals working away. They were all wearing the same black uniform that the two men carrying her wore. Whoever these people were, they were organised. And, looking at the room they were in, Kendall started to think that maybe they weren't in some kind of _building _after all.

They stopped at the foot of the throne, and the two men threw Kendall to the ground. She tried to stand, but one of them put a firm hand on her shoulder and forced her to stay on her knees. All Kendall could do was raise her head a little, and stare up at the giant in his throne.

For what seemed like minutes he didn't move. He didn't even blink. It was like he wasn't alive at all, just some kind of statue. But suddenly, Kendall heard a sharp intake of what she thought was breath. It didn't sound like a person – the sound was metallic. Like smoke being sucked through a tube by a fan. The giant started to rise to his feet. Kendall felt the two men, who were still stood either side of her, tense up. It seemed like they were as afraid of him as she was.

The giant's footsteps echoed as he walked down the stairs of his throne. All of this seemed so surreal to Kendall, like she was still asleep and dreaming all of this. But the aching in her body was real enough. If this was a dream, like she hope it was, it was the most vivid she had ever had.

The giant stopped barely a foot in front of her, and Kendall had to strain her neck to look up into his eyes. She wished she hadn't. They stared down at her with... contempt, hatred. Like she was a bug that he desperately wanted to step on.

She heard a crackling sound coming from the giant's throat. "_Cccrkkzz _you are nothing", it said. At least, she figured it was him speaking. The words didn't seem to be coming from his mouth. They sounded like they were coming from a speaker, or something, in his throat. "Everything you know is coming to an end".

And then silence. Nothingness. Without another word, the giant turned his back on Kendall and marched back up the stairs towards his throne.

"Makes you shit your pants, doesn't he?" a voice said from the side of her. It was friendly... happy and relaxed. It came as something of a shock to her. She turned her head and saw a human man leaning against the wall maybe ten feet away from where she knelt. He had a wide smile on his face, as though he were enjoying himself immensely. In any other situation, he looked like the kind of person Kendall might trust. But he wore the same black uniform as everyone else, and Kendall was fast learning that she should not feel safe around any of these people.

"Fuck knows where he came from", the man continued, walking slowly towards her. "The boss says he's an essential part of the fleet, but I say he's just a freak. You know that thing he just said to you? Says it to every single person that he sees. He's like a recording, just playing a pre-set message over and over again".

Kendall frowned. Why was he telling her these things? Unless he knew that she would never have the chance to speak of it to anyone else. She swallowed. "Who are you people?" she croaked.

"Oh, sorry, where are my manners?" the man replied. "I'm Kade. Kade Ja'hall. I'm kind of in charge of this place. Go figure". It was strange... this man had a way of making himself seem harmless, as though he wouldn't hurt a fly. Was it an act, or was he really like that?

He moved closer to her, and knelt down until his eyes were level with hers. He still wore that same smile. "We're not so bad, you know", he mumbled. Kendall moved and looked over her shoulder, up at the giant in his throne who now paid her no attention whatsoever. Kade followed her gaze. "Oh", he continued. "So maybe _he _is so bad. But the rest of us? We're just soldiers. Like I guess you are. That's an Alliance uniform, right? What brings you all the way out here, to our little backwater planet?"

Kendall looked away from him. She didn't think she had anything to lose by telling him the truth. "Our ship was destroyed", she said. "An escape pod had been ejected before it happened, and we followed it in ours. It led us here".

Kade looked at her for a few moments, presumably trying to decide whether he believed her or not. After a while, he seemed to make up his mind. "OK", he said. "That's fine. It's a shame, though. We can't let you leave. You probably noticed that this place doesn't show up on your navigation sensors. Well, that's because we're pretty private people. We don't like company".

"So..." Kendall mumbled. "What happens to us now?"

The smile that Kade had been wearing since she first saw him dropped from his face, and Kendall knew that she would not like the answer. Without speaking, he stood up and walked slowly away from her.

Then, a fist hit her hard across the face. She grunted with the shock, and fell sideways back onto the ground again. The two men who had carried her there once again dragged her to her feet. They took her into a smaller room where they spent what seemed like hours just beating her. They didn't ask her any questions, didn't seem to want anything from her. They just beat her to within an inch of her life.

And then they stopped, just as suddenly as they had started. No words, no communication whatsoever. They just stopped, and then they both left, leaving Kendall a bloodied mess on the floor. For a while she just lay there, struggling to breath. They must have cracked one or two of her ribs, because every breath sent a sharp stabbing pain through her chest. She was in a bad way. Even in her dazed state, she knew that.

But she was still alive. Like Bowes... both still alive. What did they want with them? Who were they. _Where _were they?

As if to answer her, the wall of the room she was in suddenly started to rise, revealing a large window behind. It took maybe twenty seconds to raise fully, but from where Kendall was lying she couldn't see anything out of it.

She grunted, and dragged herself along the floor towards the wall. When she reached it she climbed up it, doing her best to ignore the pain. It took nearly all the effort she had, but eventually she climbed far enough to see through the window.

She wished she hadn't. What she saw sent shivers down her spine. Took her breath away. She had been right. They weren't in a building. They weren't even on the planet any more. They were in a ship.

And through the window she could see... hundreds, maybe thousands, of other ships. All types. Destroyers, Cruisers, Freighters... a fleet of ships that could walk over the Alliance and the Rebels. But it wasn't just the numbers that scared Kendall. Each ship had a symbol imprinted on its side, and it was one that she recognised. One that had been taught to nearly every child in the Galaxy. A symbol from history, long ago, when the Old Republic still ruled.

It was the symbol of the Sith.


	17. Chapter 16

**Chapter 16**

"So... What the fuck do we do now?"

The Raven floated slowly through the depths of space. Garr had navigated to the backwater reaches of the Outer Rim – he didn't really think that it would stop anyone from finding them, he just did it to make himself feel a little better.

The four of them had gathered in the cargo bay, where the Orb was being held in a thick metal case. They stood around it, Garr with arms folded, Elle wearing the worried face of someone who still feels out of her depth. Batalla was as she always was – quiet, mysterious. Impossible to read. Marc stood slightly apart from the rest, deep in thought. About what..? Well, who's to say.

Garr looked around at the others. "Well", he said. "I'm glad you've all rushed to give me an answer. Fills me with so much confidence".

"What do you expect us to say?" Elle said, annoyed. "We don't know anything more than you do. Can't we... I don't know, hit it with a hammer, or something?"

Marc's head lifted. "Try it", he mumbled. "I bet you anything it'll hurt the hammer more than the orb. This thing is... It's something beyond our understanding. We don't know how to destroy it, and we don't know how to hide it. We need help".

Garr laughed. "Yeah", he said, nodding. "Good plan, kid. _Great _plan. Ask for help, he says". He walked forward so that he was stood beside the metal case, a the centre of the group. "We're criminals. We just walked away from the biggest shit storm I have ever seen. We might have been the _only _ones to walk away from it for all we know. Who's gonna help us?"

They all stood in silence for a long time. Garr was right. They had no idea what was happening out in the Galaxy, or who was looking for them.

"We can't do this alone, Garr", Elle said. "Look... We need information. Think about it. Where is the biggest store of information that we can think of?"

Garr looked at her for a while, not quite understanding what she was suggesting. And then it dawned on him.

"You want us to go to _Coruscant?" _he yelled. "Right into the heart of the Alliance? Are you _insane_?"

Marc suddenly pushed himself away from the wall and moved up beside Elle. "It makes sense", he said. "Even we know about the Jedi Archives. The Alliance boast about it all the time. The _greatest centre of knowledge in the Galaxy_, they say. If there's anywhere that has information about this thing, it's there".

Garr threw his hands in the air, exasperated, and moved back over to the wall. "Shit", he said.

"This is, uh, X... four... eight... alpha... calling Coruscant Command. Is there anyone there?"

Garr was leant over the communications terminal on the bridge, with Marc, Elle and Batalla stood around him. Marc was smiling.

"X-Four-Eight-Alpha?" he said. "Where the hell did that come from?"

Garr glanced sideways at him. "What?" he replied. "I had to say something, didn't I? I couldn't just open up and say 'Hey, dudes, it's Garr!' They'd never have answered".

Elle leant over him, and looked down at the communicator. It was strange... she had never thought of herself as an engineer, but she found that she could figure out the various symbols on the screens just by looking at them.

"They're not answering now", she said.

Garr grunted. "I know", he growled. "It vexes me. There should be someone there every minute of every day. Something must be jamming us…"

"No, that's not it". Elle reached her hand out and punched a few buttons on the console. "There's no jam. The signal's getting through they're just not answering us… Something must have happened". She moved over to the co-pilot's seat and began to tap away at another console. After a few seconds the cockpit was filled with a dozen different transmissions, all coming from Coruscant. And they were all screaming.

Elle had covered her ears to try and drown the noise out. "What is it?" she screamed.

Garr dived across her, yelling. "You've opened us up to too many transmissions. We need to filter it down to a single one at a time". He grabbed at the console in front of Elle and, one by one, the horrifying transmissions cut off, until there was just one left…

_"Cccrrkk_ –_lp us", _a woman's voice said through their speakers. _"Please somebody… anybody. They're all around us. We… we can't keep them out…"_

Suddenly, the woman was interrupted by the sound of gunfire and more screaming in the distance. Then the cockpit was drowned in a piercing scream – terrified, and deafening. The sound made Elle almost jump right out of her skin.

And then all that was left was the steady hum of static. The transmission had been cut off.

For the longest time, none of them spoke. Elle had raised her hand to cover her mouth, as though she were struggling not to vomit. Marc was the first to make a move. He walked forward, to the front of the cockpit, and put his hand on Elle's shoulder. She slowly turned her head upwards to look at him, and he saw that her eyes were filling with tears.

Marc turned to Garr. "We can't go there", he said. "It's not safe".

Garr looked at him for a moment, and then he leant forward and tapped on his console. "Yeah", he said as the ship slowed to a halt. "No shit. So what the hell do we do now? We can't get rid of the orb, and we can't find anything out about it without the Jedi, who seem for all intents and purposes to have collectively lost their shit".

Marc let out a loud sigh. "I don't know…" he said. "There are stories of other places… other treasure houses of knowledge. But I don't know which of them are true and which are just legends. The Jedi archives were the only things that were definitely real".

Elle lowered her hand from her mouth. "Where…" she started to say, but her voice cracked. She cleared her throat and tried again. "Where are these other places?"

All of them – Elle, Garr and Batalla – stared at Marc. He looked up and stared out of the cockpit window. "I don't know… I think there was meant to be one on Ossus, another on Coruscant, ", he said. "And… there's always Korriban".

Garr leapt out of his seat, eyes wide. "Woah, woah", he said. "Hell with that. I will not fly this ship to the home world of the Sith. I don't care if it's been abandoned for years – that place gives me the creeps, and I've never even been there".

"Then we go to the first one", Elle said. Her voice was strong now… confident, commanding. "Ossus. We're going to Ossus".


	18. Chapter 17

**Chapter 17**

"_Zrkk _This is Master Adeus Draven of the Ossus Jedi Academy. Our planet is lost. If you value your lives, do not approach. If you have come to attempt a rescue, then your journey has been wasted. We are already dead. There is nothing you can do for us. We have lost our minds".

The message had begun playing as soon as they had entered orbit around Ossus. This man – this Master Draven – had a voice like cold steel. Despite his horrific words, there was no emotion in his voice – no fear, or hesitation. His words were delivered in such a matter of fact way that there was no reason to doubt their truth.

"Well", Garr said with a sigh. "That sucks".

Elle was leant forward over the control consoles, a deep frown on her brow. "There are only fifty-seven life forms on the entire planet…" she said, almost to herself. "That's… _manageable. _Don't you think?_"_

A smile spread across Marc's face. He stood behind Elle and grabbed her shoulder. "That's dangerous talk", he said. "You up for it?"

"Woah", Garr said, waving his hands. "Ready for what? You're not seriously suggesting that we go down there, are you? Didn't you hear what the dead Jedi dude just said? Whatever happened on Coruscant – whatever happened to the Jedi – happened here too. We can't go down there".

Elle tapped a few more buttons on the front console, and the cockpit was bathed in light. A hologram of the planet's surface appeared in the centre of the room. Elle turned around slightly in her chair so that she could see the hologram.

"Look", she said. "Most of this planet is wasteland. Uninhabitable". The hologram zoomed in on the surface, so that only a bird's eye view of the Academy Grounds were visible. "Only the Academy grounds are liveable. And… whoever is alive down there, they're not the smartest bunch of people. The number of life signs is dropping – it's gone down by three since we arrived in orbit. They must be wandering too far into the wastelands, and dying".

"So…" Marc said. "What if we create something… _interesting_ for them to wander towards?"

"A distraction…" Garr mumbled.

"Yeah", Elle said. "That would help. Me, Marc and Batalla can take a pod and approach from one side. Garr, you fly the Raven slowly over the Academy. Slow enough to get their attention. Then you park it out in the wastelands, on the opposite side of the grounds".

"And, what, wait for them to come and eat me?" Garr asked. "Sorry, but that's a pretty shitty idea".

Batalla, who until then had been sitting in unmoving silence, suddenly climbed to her feet. Without speaking – without even looking at her companions – she moved towards the weapons locker to the side of the cockpit and started to gear up.

Garr sighed. "Shit", he said.

* * *

"OK, are you guys ready?"

Marc, Elle and Batalla were all crammed into an escape pod that was only meant for one, listening to Garr's voice over coming through the speakers. Elle, who had to squeeze onto Marc's lap, leant over to the communications control and flicked a switch.

"Yeah, can we hurry this along?" she said into the communicator. "Feel like I'm going to suffocate in here".

There was no response, but after a few seconds they heard a loud banging sound coming from outside the pod, and then a sudden jolt as the pod was launched. Through the view screen, the three passengers watched as the Raven grew smaller and smaller the further towards the planet they came.

After a moment or two, the Raven slowly began to move towards a different part of the planet – the Jedi Academy. Their plan was for the escape pod to land perhaps a mile or so outside the Academy grounds. They would then walk the rest of the way. While they were travelling, the Raven would fly slowly over the Academy, to attract the attention of any of those… _things _that were left in the area. Hopefully, they would follow the Raven out into the wastelands, giving them a clear path to the temple.

They touched down at the foot of an impossibly high mountain. It seemed to Elle that the mountain stretched further than the sky. The Academy stood in its shadow – just less than a mile away.

Suddenly, they heard the roar of an engine overhead. The Raven appeared from behind the mountain and soared high overhead. It raced toward the Academy, getting closer and closer to the ground as it did. By the time it got to the outer walls of the Academy, it was barely fifty feet from the ground, and it had slowed to a crawl. If that wasn't enough to grab the attention of any… _thing _that might be wondering around down there, Garr fired off a single volley from the ship's blasters, destroying a section of the dormitories.

_That'll do it_, Elle thought. _Nice work Garr._

Marc helped Elle to climb free of the pod, while Batalla surveyed their surroundings. It was a wasteland – there was nothing but the academy and the scorched ground as far as the eye could see. Two centuries ago this planet had been thriving, a focal point for the new Jedi Order which had formed in the wake of the Galactic Empire's destruction, and one of many of the Sith's defeats.

But then the Yuuzhan Vong came, sweeping across the Galaxy leaving nothing but fire and destruction in their wake. As the group trudged along Elle began to wonder how people back then coped, even after the war had ended. _Trillions _of people died. A number so vast that it was rendered meaningless. It was the worst series of massacres in the entire history of the Galaxy. Elle didn't know whether she would have been able to live with what those people went through.

The Yuuzhan Vong were animals.

* * *

It took them around thirty minutes to reach the Academy, and they were glad to find that it looked deserted. If there had been anyone there before the Raven had flown by, then they must have followed the ship out into the wastelands. They would be dead before long.

Elle had been quietly worried that, when they reached the Academy, they would struggle to locate the library. But she needn't have worried. The Temple towered above the rest of the buildings, at the centre of the grounds. It looked as though the whole Academy had been built up around it.

The doors were wide open. They crept inside, wordlessly, not daring to make a sound. The floor squeaked underneath their feet, and Elle winced at each sound that their feet made.

And then she smelt it. A stench so nauseating that she struggled not to gag. Even though she had never experienced anything like it before, she knew immediately what that smell was. It was death.

The three of them approached a corridor towards the back of the entrance hall, and Elle saw motionless feet sticking out around the corner.

"Oh god…" she whispered, involuntarily. Her and Marc stopped moving, but Batalla – no stranger to death – continued onward. When she rounded the corner, though, even she hesitated. There were dozens of bodies, piled up on top of one another. Some of them had been hacked to death – the cuts were cauterised, and she knew that the only thing which could cause those wounds was a light sabre. Others, though… they looked as though parts of them had been… _eaten_.

Batalla took a deep breath of the rancid air, and motioned for Marc and Elle to follow her through. The library must be at the back of the building, beyond this corridor.

"Hey", Marc whispered. "Just… close your eyes, and hold my hand".

Elle looked at him, eyes wide. She was frightened, and she was struggling not to vomit… but instead of clutching Marc's hand, she clenched her fists and marched forward, eyes open.

As soon as she saw the bodies she wished she had taken Marc's offer. It was horrific. How could anything do this to another living being? Some of their faces were contorted in agony, as though they had died screaming. They must have been alive while they were being eaten.

It seemed to take forever to tip-toe their way around the bodies, but, eventually, they emerged out the other side. And they were confronted by a locked door.

Marc moved forward and grabbed the handle, but it wouldn't budge. "Shit", he mumbled to himself. He looked over his shoulder at Batalla and, wordlessly, she moved forward beside him.

"Ok", Marc continued. "On three. One, two, three!"

In sync, Marc and Batalla rammed their shoulders into the door. It didn't budge on the first attempt, so they repeated the move again and again.

It took a few minutes, but, suddenly, the door's hinges flew away from the wall, and Marc and Batalla fell forward through the doorway onto the ground.

The room beyond was dark. A few seconds after they had fallen, a low hum filled their ears, and a blue light illuminated the room.

Marc lifted his head. Barely an inch from his face, he saw the glowing blade of a light sabre. His eyes followed it along its blade, down its handle and up the arm which held it.

"Hey", he said. "You're really short".


End file.
